MINDS at the Southampton Science and Engineering Festival (SOTSEF) 2022
MINDS CDT students participated in this year's wider Southampton Science and Engineering Festival (SOTSEF), the University of Southampton's interdisciplinary science festival that allows everyone to explore and discover what the world of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) has to offer.
Caterina Sbandati and Maddy Dwyer prepared a presentation on the history of human interaction with means of transport and the present state of autonomous vehicles. On an online presentation followed by Q&A that was live streamed during the British Science Week on the 12th of March 2022 in YouTube and Facebook Live online platforms, Caterina and Callum Aitchison stimulated debate about what is desirable for the future of autonomous vehicles and the challenges of their wider deployment in our lives. You can watch their recorded presentation here.The students were excited to make live demonstrations of their research projects and communicate in person AI concepts to a general public covering all age ranges in the Science and Engineering Day 2022 that took place in Highfield Campus on the 7th of May 2022.
Ilias Kazantzidis, Olaf Lipinski and Jennifer Barnes-Nunn explained how reinforcement learning is applied to an AI agent through trial and error. In their interactive game Go Treasure Hunting With Thymio the Robot the visitors tried to navigate a robot in a Gridworld, training it to avoid danger (e.g. falling in the water), and then let it find the shortest path alone. Matthew Durrant designed and organised a Game Theory Workshop, which Matthew presented along with Konstantinos Drylerakis. The 20 participants played the Prisoner's Dilemma game and learned the basics of game theory, while one winner was awarded an Amazon gift voucher. Elliot Stein and Kian Spencer made a live demonstration of How is sound perceived by smart speakers?. They explained the "cocktail party problem" to the visitors by inviting them to test how different sounds and noises were perceived by their speaker depending on their distance from the source and the background noise.Related Links
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