Bio

Ross Goodwin is a data poet, an artist, creative technologist, hacker, gonzo data scientist, and a former White House ghostwriter. Goodwin employs machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) & generation (NLG), physical computing, and other technologies to realize new forms and interfaces for written language.

Goodwin’s projects and collaborations have earned international acclaim: from word.camera, a camera that expressively narrates its photographs in real time using artificial neural networks (web app + installations, 2015-present), to SUNSPRING, the world's first film created from an AI-written screenplay (2016 short film, directed by Oscar Sharp, starring Thomas Middleditch); from making London’s Trafalgar Square lions roar poetry (2018, Please Feed The Lions with Es Devlin), to writing a novel with a car (2017-2018, 1 the Road).

Working outside traditional arts funding models, Goodwin has received sponsorship from large technology companies like Google and AT&T, media companies like iHeart and BuzzFeed, news outlets like The Economist and Univision, academic institutions like Teacher’s College at Columbia University, and fashion houses like Rag & Bone. However, Goodwin also has produced significant volumes of indepedent creative work directly from his personal studio: prototyping original ideas rapidly on limited budgets, and sharing results in real time both online and physically.

Although he began his B.S. degree in Physics in 2005-2006, and despite working full-time on the 2008 Obama campaign and 2008-2009 Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Team as a ghostwriter and completing numerous other internships along with extracurricular commitments, Goodwin earned his undergraduate degree in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in May 2009. His first job after graduation was a Presidential Writer position at The White House, where he wrote nearly 100 Presidential Proclamations. After next working at the U.S. Treasury Department on financial regulatory reform, Goodwin learned computer code, then gravitated immediately to natural language processing, natural language generation, and computational creative writing. He earned his graduate degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program a.k.a. ITP at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in May 2016.

Winner of the 2018 IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling as well as Columbia University's Digital Dozen Breakthroughs in Storytelling Award for 2019, Goodwin has exhibited work &/or spoken at Ars Electronica, London Design Festival, NYC Fashion Week, Sundance Film Festival, Cannes Lions, SXSW, the Barbican, the London Science Museum, the V&A Museum, the Serpentine Galleries, Science Gallery International, the World Economic Forum, the TriBeCa Film Festival Interactive Showcase, the International Center of Photography, AT&T Shape, TEDxBoston, MLconf, IDFA DocLab, Vivid Sydney, Phi Centre, Gray Area, the MIT Media Lab, Columbia University Teacher’s College, Zurich University of the Arts, Maker Faire, Future of Storytelling, GitHub Universe, Strange Loop, GOTO Chicago, Series Mania, the NeurIPS machine learning conference, STATE Festival, Retune Festival, Molasses Books, and other venues.

Goodwin and his work have been featured in The Atlantic, WIRED [II], Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, The New York Post, Vogue, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal [II,III], Le Monde [II,III], The London Times, TimeOut, NPR, Marketplace, BBC Culture, CBS News, The Financial Times [II,III], Popular Science, The Irish Times [II,III], El Pais, La Segunda, Het Financieele Dagblad, NewsTalkFM (Ireland), RTE Radio Ireland, CBC Radio Canada [II], ABC Radio Australia, Deutschlandradio, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, The Daily Mail [II,III,IV,V], Ars Technica [II,III], The Verge [II,III], VICE [II,III,IV,V, VI,VII,VIII,IX,X], Usbek & Rica, France Culture [II], Les Échos, Image & Narrative, Le Figaro, Technology Review, Radio Télévision Suisse, canal+, arte, franceinfo, Gizmoto [II,III], Engadget, CNET [II], Forbes, SLATE, FiveThirtyEight, Mental Floss, BOMB Magazine, MSN, Fast Company, Filmmaker Magazine, Dim The House Lights [II,III], The Huffington Post, The Caret, The Art Newspaper (France), Digital Information World [II], AdWeek, Singularity Hub [II], Mashable, Fusion [II,III,IV,V,VI,VII], Quartz, PetaPixel, Cool Hunting, Uses This, A.V. Club, IndieWire, La Repubblica, Der Spiegel, TechCrunch (Japan), Yahoo News, The Korea Times, BoingBoing, Vox, Mic, CineFiles, Bustle, Express (UK), The Mary Sue, The Quint, Futurism, 9 News Australia, International Business Times, BigThink, Digital Spy, Kill Screen, Inquisitr, Inquirer.net, Gear Patrol, Inverse, New Atlas, Collider, HYPEBEAST, The Next Web, The Drive, Sputnik News, comicbook.com, SYFY Wire, BGR, catch news, Silicon Republic, the New York Times Metro Section, and other publications.

Creative Technology Experience

New York, NY

Los Angeles, CA

San Diego, CA

2015 to Present

Google

Created and published the book project 1 the Road and other artwork sponsored by Google.
Assisted Refik Anadol & his studio with research, development, and code for WDCH Dreams for the LA Philharmonic's centennial celebration in 2018.
Gave the 19th-century bronze lion statues of London's Trafalgar Square a voice with Es Devlin's Please Feed The Lions project for her 2018 Fourth Plinth commission, which constructed an enormous day glo red fifth lion in the square, and allowed the public to feed this new lion statue words and then watch it "roar" poetry.
Worked on various small research and prototyping projects as the first Creative Technologist for Google's Artists + Machine Intelligence (A+MI) Program.
Generated thousands of individualized poems for tree leaves in Es Devlin's 2017-2018 interactive installation The Singing Tree at The V&A Museum in London.
Developed an interface to realize autocomplete for creative writing using long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for Google's Cultural Institute
Wrote poetry generating software for Es Devlin's POEMPORTRAITS, a photo booth that projects computer generated poems over visitors' faces at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2017, Google Zeitgeist and the Google Arts & Culture Lab in 2018, and The Barbican AI exhibition in 2019.
Designed and showcased creative machine learning demonstrations for YouTube advertising clients at Sundance Film Festival and Cannes Lions in 2018.
Trained convolutional neural network (CNN) / LSTM poetic image captioning systems to produce automatic voiceover for DeepDream VR, exhibited at Gray Area in San Francisco in February 2016 and the TriBeCa Film Festival Internative Showcase in April 2016
Trained CNN/LSTM image captioning system to title DeepDream artwork by Mike Tyka in early 2016.
Developed creative concepts and software for various machine learning projects and products at Google.
Received competitive grants from Google at NYU ITP each semester to fund independent Narrated Reality research.

New York, NY

February 2017 to September 2017

Buzzfeed

Built a skip-thought (sentence vector) model using data from Richard B. Spencer gathered via social media and LexisNexis, and using that model to find representations and relationships in semantic space between Spencer and other individuals and arbitrary user-supplied text
Trained an automatic image captioning model on Caroline Sinders’ photographs and selected writings that will describe or narrate unseen images using a deep learning system composed of three artificial neural networks

New York, NY

June 2016 to January 2017

Columbia University

Awarded art commission from EdLab at Teacher's College
Created word.camera@smith.learning.theater, an art installation using six Axis pan-tilt-zoom surveillance cameras in conjunction with a CNN/LSTM expressive image captioning system to narrate activities within the Smith Learning Theater, a 6000-square-foot space at Teacher's College, in real time
Trained LSTM RNNs on the complete Teacher's College academic archives to produce custom narration appropriate to the space
Fabricated custom hardware appliance to handle all computation locally, communicate with surveillance cameras, and produce expressive narration

New York, NY

March 2016 to December 2016

The Economist

Trained LSTM RNNs on news archives from The Economist as well as economic data to predict news from economic trends
Built an interactive chat bot for writers and editors to query their style guide

New York, NY

March 2016 to July 2016

DBRS & The Guardian

Selected as DBRS Innovation Lab Artist in Residence, June 2016
Trained LSTM RNNs on technology news articles from The Guardian
Produced machine-generated technology news articles for The Guardian

New York, NY

August 2015 to April 2016

Fusion

Built a team of four creative technologists to analyze and report on online data from candidates in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
Utilized natural language processing to produce articles with in-depth analysis for fusion.net

New York, NY

June to August 2015

Ufora (engineering internship)

Selected as HackNY Fellow for summer 2016
Built a term frequency – inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) library for clustering natural language documents by topic in Fora, Ufora's proprietary programming language for automtic parallelization

Policy & Writing Career (2006 to 2014)

Washington, DC

U.S. Department of the Treasury

June 2011 to February 2012

Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC)

Special Assistant for FSOC Policy

Developed operations processes to stand up the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a new agency created by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform & Consumer Protection Act
Drafted and edited FSOC-related Congressional testimony, talking points, and official correspondence for the Treasury Secretary and other senior FSOC officials

June 2010 to June 2011

Office of the Chief of Staff and Executive Secretariat

Special Assistant

Modernized and automated document management processes for paper flow between Secretary Geithner and other senior officials to improve openness, transparency, and efficiency
Wrote the Treasury Department’s Weekly Report to the White House.
Established and maintained a unified “Q&A Book” to ensure the Secretary, Deputy Secretary, and other senior Treasury officials delivered consistent messages during public appearances
Drafted official memoranda, issued by Treasury’s Chief of Staff and Executive Secretary, to establish and enforce agencywide processes
Selected, compiled, and delivered Secretary Geithner’s daily briefing materials, including information memoranda, working documents, external reports, and correspondence

Washington, DC

July 2009 to June 2010

The White House

Presidential Writer, Coordinator for Proclamations

Wrote over 60 Presidential Proclamations for President Obama, including the President’s first Thanksgiving Day and Martin Luther King, Jr., Federal Holiday proclamations, and initiated new observances, including National Entrepreneurship Week and Cesar Chavez Day
Coordinated content and built consensus among advisors in policy-making offices at the White House

Chicago, IL, and Washington, DC

November 2008 to January 2009

Obama-Biden Transition Project

Staff, Presidential Transition Team

Processed CVs, recommendation letters, and other materials from candidates for senior political appointments in the Obama administration

Chicago, IL

June to November 2008

Obama for America

Communications Coordinator, Republicans for Obama

Developed and delivered a pragmatic message through online and print media to urge moderate Republican voters to support Barack Obama, and to publicize high-profile Republican endorsements

Boston, MA, and Washington, DC

September 2006 to August 2007

U.S. Senator John Kerry, Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship

Speechwriting Intern / Committee Intern

Wrote op-eds, talking points, speech segments, press releases, and letters for Senator Kerry
Managed constituent casework related to healthcare, energy, and environmental policy

Education

New York, NY

September 2014 to May 2016

New York University

Master of Professional Studies, Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)

Received Google Experiments in Storytelling grants for spring 2015, fall 2015, and spring 2016 semesters
Led numerous seminars on natural language processing, machine learning, and basic programming
Thesis project details: http://narratedreality.com
More project details: http://thehypertext.com

Cambridge, MA

September 2005 to June 2009

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Bachelor of Science, Economics (Course XIV)

Researched foreign policy rhetoric of American politicians and other topics under the guidance of Professor Noam Chomsky
Managed Delve, an education outreach program that provided free full-year AP classes for local high school students
Burchard Scholar, 2007 (MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences)
Dana Mead Award, 2007 (MIT Washington DC Internship Program)

Cambridge, UK

September 2007 to June 2008

University of Cambridge

Cambridge-MIT Exchange

Competed on the Cambridge Union's British Parliamentary debate team