🚀 Currently building
creative AI prototypes
🛠️ I'm an AI Experience Research Engineer at Upstatement
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✨ More fun: draw + play,
synthruary, and
genuary.
👋 Welcome to say hello!
My name is Kawandeep Virdee
I am the author of “Feeling Great About My
Butt,” and enjoy making media, ranging from interactive web experiments, to public art,
to wall
drawings. I organize events to inspire creativity — be it art & tech salons, workshops, or spaces to do nothing.
I'm currently developing the AI strategy and prototyping experiences as an AI Experience Research Engineer at Upstatement.
It is within spaces that cultivate creativity, community, and being that powerful opportunities emerge to address difficult challenges.
Previously, I was a data scientist at the New England Complex Systems Institute. My interest in tech led to me join Embedly as a machine learning engineer, soon leading product and strategy until acquisition by Medium in 2016. There I was a product manager for three years before founding an initiative to build a stronger connection with creators across the platform, which I led for two years.
My art has shown at venues including the Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston Convention Center, SFMOMA, Transmediale, and the MIT Media Lab. Talks and workshops include MIT, Google Creative Lab, Facebook, Society of News Design, EYEO, FITC, and JSConf. My work has been covered in publications including the Atlantic, Science, Vice, NewScientist, Make, Core77, the New York Times, The Guardian, and the Globe.
I often speak at festivals, conferences, and companies. The talks range and are generally about technology, creativity, new media, interactivity, and future of news. A few highlights:
I founded a conference series called Hacking Journalism, bringing together journalists, data scientists, developers, and designers to build prototypes exploring possibilities in news media.
BLOOPDANCE: Shake your phone and it sings
It goes through a good chunk of my projects, and also gets into the ideas behind them, and realizations I've had in the process about love and the universe.