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Does your robot vacuum cleaner have a name?

On 13 September 2020, the Night of Science once again took place on Schadowplatz in front of the Haus der Universität in Düsseldorf. The crowds were huge, showing the great interest of the city's public in science from a wide range of disciplines.

HeiCAD presented itself in the evening with its own information stand in the exhibition tent. Numerous visitors stopped by and followed the motto 'Understanding AI'. The team used two examples to explain how machines learn and how AI tools work in practice.

An analogue puzzle game made it easy for visitors to understand how a computer learns. The human competes against the machine, which receives feedback in the form of small coloured wooden cubes for each successful move. When the colours start to sort out, it means that the machine has learned a strategy and knows how to make successful moves. It has learned during the course of the game.

In a second example, the audience was also able to observe a computer learning from two image files. However, an error had (deliberately) crept into the selection of images, meaning that the data had a so-called 'bias', a weighting, which then led to incorrect classifications.

Finally, Dr Jacqueline Klusik-Eckert, art historian and HeiCAD collaborator, entered the arena of scientific presentations for HeiCAD. In her short talk on 'Anthropomorphism', she gave an insight into why we often ascribe human characteristics to our technical devices, or even give them names, and what this means for our interaction with technology.

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The Night of Science was a cooperation project between Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, the Jülich Research Centre, the German Diabetes Centre, the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research and the WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management.

 

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