Husky Social & Theater Night: “The Adding Machine”

In this unique adaptation of “The Adding Machine,” the unremarkable Mr. Zero, an accountant, is unexpectedly replaced by an adding machine. What follows is a series of remarkable events during and after his life that are outside of his control — or are they? In this devised adaptation, director Ryan Purcell and student artists will examine the present-day emergence of artificial intelligence in the context of Elmer Rice’s prescient expressionistic classic of the 1920s. This is a UW production featuring student actors. Learn more from UW Drama.

Afra Mashhadi, Assistant Professor

Afra Mashhadi is a researcher, educator and an advocate for ethics and diversity in computing. She is an assistant professor of CSS at the University of Washington Bothell. She is also part of the steering committee of newly established Responsible AI Systems and Experiences Centre at University of Washington and an adjunct in the Information School. Dr Mashhadi is also an affiliate of e-Science institute and Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE). Her research focuses on computational behavioral modelling and ethical AI. She is interested in developing mathematical and computational models that leverage the proliferation of digital data and breakthroughs in machine learning to (1) understand societies and social phenomena at different spatial scales, and (2) model social dynamics of human behavior. Results of her research have been published in top-tier conferences (WSDM, CHI, CSCW, Ubicomp, ICWSM) and journals, and trialed as part of multiple deployments in European projects and private entities such as WebSummit. Her most recent professional activities include acting as Program Chair for ICWSM 2021, SocInfo 2019, Tutorial Chair for IC2S2 and Broadening Participation Chair for ACM Ubicomp 2023 as well as serving as senior committee member for numerous conferences including FaccT, CHI, WebSci, and ICWSM.

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Anna Preus, Assistant Professor

Anna Preus studies early 20th-century literature in English and data science in the humanities. She is especially interested in how historical print cultures are being transferred online through large-scale text digitization efforts and in how digital resources can help us tell new kinds of stories about literary history. Her current project, “Publishing Empire: Colonial Authorship and British Literary Production, 1900-1940,” examines the production histories and printed forms of texts by authors from areas colonized by Britain, tracing the marketing efforts surrounding their works from small, fine-press editions at the turn of the 20th century to mass-market paperbacks at the beginning of the Second World War. She is also at work on a digital edition of Hope Mirrlees’s modernist long poem “Paris,” and a related piece on depictions of imperial failure in Post-WWI metropolitan capitals. At the UW, she leads the new Humanities Data Lab, and also serves as core faculty in the Textual Studies program and as a Data Science Fellow with the eScience Institute. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Mozilla Foundation, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Feminist Modernist Studies, Modernism/Modernity Print+, and the edited collection Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Cultures.

Online bio