NYC-hacker

Hi All, I'm looking to join a PhD program. I live in New York City and have a focused area of research I would like to pursue and would like to get some advice on schools or professors that might be a good fit. I do not want to move from the city, and have a fairly unique background. I did a BS/MS in Computer Science about 10 years ago from Stanford, had an ok GPA (~3.6) on a fairly tenacious course load. I did a lot of work in Computer Graphics during my undergrad (primarily around rendering), during my masters I focused on AI & Computer Vision. I also taught for 2 years during my masters. I am also an artist and have practiced fine art most of my life. Following school I went into startups and ended up starting a technology company that was acquired. At this point in my career I'd like to focus on ideas that I've been having for most of my life. I own a home in New York City and would like to stay there. Specifically I'd like to work on tools to characterize knowledge within AI systems. If you think of human beings, we have a physiology that interprets data from the world. Art, language, music are examples of characterizations of the relationship between this physiology and the signals it receives from the environment -- with consciousness as a mediating force. The goal would be to precisely characterize these aspects formally from the ground up, via first principles, through intuitions I have developed via my art practice. There is some recent work that is starting to think along these lines: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2019.0513 If you have any pointers on the process or tips that would be much appreciated. I'm currently looking at Columbia, NYU, CCNY, Baruch and Fordham, not sure if there are others. Thanks!