A new film follows MINDS postgraduate researcher Yaseen Mohammed Osman and his SustAI collaborators as they use sensors and artificial intelligence to give the River Itchen a voice. It also shows why putting developing research in front of the public matters.
Giving environmental data a voice
How do you encourage people to ask questions about the health of a river?
Talking Itchen approaches that challenge by allowing the river to answer back. The project connects measurements including dissolved oxygen, pH, turbidity, temperature and total dissolved solids to an AI system that explains what the readings mean in accessible language.
A new film follows the project at the British Science Festival 2026, where visitors could speak to the system and hear the River Itchen respond.
The demonstration brought together the work of three postgraduate researchers. Yaseen Mohammed Osman, from MINDS, worked on the language model behind the river’s answers. SustAI postgraduate researcher Andrei Șontea led work on electronics and sensors, while Angelina Spilnyk led work on behavioural design and river law.
Connecting public engagement to doctoral research
Yaseen Mohammed Osman’s doctoral research explores how large language models can be made more efficient. His aim is to help make it possible for models to run on personal devices instead of depending on remote, energy-intensive data centres. That could reduce the computing resources they require while allowing sensitive information to remain on a user’s device.
Talking Itchen gave him a practical and unexpected context in which to discuss those questions.
Some Festival visitors wanted to know where the language model was running and why a researcher might choose University-controlled infrastructure instead of a commercial cloud service. That opened conversations about circumstances in which keeping information local could matter, including privacy-sensitive settings. Others wanted to understand the attention mechanism that helps a language model interpret a word according to its context.
These questions moved the discussion beyond what the system could do. They encouraged visitors to consider how AI is built, where it operates and what those choices could mean for the people using it.
Public engagement as part of the research process
The film captures people encountering Talking Itchen through curiosity and conversation. Some asked about the river and its health. Others deliberately moved beyond the demonstration’s original purpose, posing unrelated questions to discover how the AI would respond.
Those interactions matter because public engagement is not only a way to explain research after the work has been completed. It can also expose researchers to questions, expectations and possible uses that may not surface in the laboratory.
As Yaseen Mohammed Osman explains in the film, “involving the public also informs us whether what we’re doing is actually needed or not”.
That makes engagement a two-way process. Researchers have to explain technical decisions clearly, but they also hear how people understand the technology, what concerns them and where they think it could be useful.
For a demonstration built around conversation, that exchange is particularly important. Talking Itchen does not ask visitors simply to look at river data. It invites them to decide what they want to know and to test the answers they receive.
Building research across disciplines
Talking Itchen combines expertise from MINDS and SustAI across language models, environmental sensing, behavioural design and river law. Its conversational interface depends on those elements working together: measurements provide the data, the AI system explains them, and the wider engagement activity gives people a reason to ask questions about the river.
For Yaseen Mohammed Osman, the project also creates a visible connection between his research on efficient language models and the people who may ultimately encounter AI-enabled systems.
The film gives viewers a closer look at that process, showing not just a technical demonstration but a public test of how developing research is understood, questioned and discussed.
Watch the Talking Itchen film, then explore Yaseen Mohammed Osman’s MINDS profile. Read the separate SustAI perspectives from Angelina Spilnyk and Andrei Șontea to learn more about the project’s environmental, behavioural and sensing work.