Creating a Scene with Science | Niranjan Pedanekar | TEDxVITPune

Theatre is considered as one of the oldest and the purest art form of human civilization. Inspired by the technical, modern and conceptual changes taking place in the 21st Century, Niranjan Pedanekar, an AI Scientist is revolutionizing this ancient art form. Niranjan has a day job of a scientist and is also a playwright, who has written, directed, translated and acted in numerous plays. Niranjan speaks about establishing a human-machine interaction and co-relation to make this art form better. He showcases his revolutionary vision of using modern-day AI algorithms in theatre and techniques which helps a director in creating a scene with the help of science. As a scientist, Niranjan has scripted algorithms like visual saliency which detect the region of attention of the audiences in a scene which is being enacted on the stage. He also talks about using techniques like the flocking algorithm which enables actors to understand the depth of their character and the methodology to be adopted to bring the best out of them.

Niranjan envisions theatre as one of the most prevailing art forms and draws inspiration from AI to modernize it. He talks about his personal intention to assist artists to create better art and better engagement with the aid of machines. He believes that it is a human-machine co-creation rather than just machine creating everything and we just consuming. It allows artists to be even better. He speaks and shares his unique idea and skill-set, that has already revolutionized the methodology and ideology of a playwright and a theatre director and transformed this beautiful art form. Niranjan Pedanekar works as a Principal Scientist at the Tata Research Development and Design Centre. He has extensive experience in application of data sciences and AI for domains and has international publications and patents to his credit. As a playwright, he has written, adapted or translated 17 plays in Marathi, Hindi and English, including adaptations of eminent authors like Kafka, Chekhov, Akutagawa, Saramago and Darwish into plays. The play Upashya, written and directed by him, was staged at the 18th Bharat Rang Mahotsav 2016 at NSD. He is the 2018 recipient of the prestigious Tendulkar-Dubey fellowship awarded annually to five theatre artists chosen from all over the country. He plans to uses Artificial Intelligence techniques such as Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing to enhance the theatre experience. His dream is to make an original contribution to the field of theatre which would be as significant as that made by the likes of Stanislavsky. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx