Talking to robots and making music with code...

Talking to robots and making music with code were just two of the activities visitors could try out at our day of open events on Saturday 18 March.

Running from 10:00 to 16:00, our day of events was taking place as part of the 2023 Cambridge Festival.

Hundreds of visitors came through our doors looking to: 

• meet some of our robots
• try coding music like a DJ with Sonic Pi software (by watching a live demo and/or attending a hands-on workshop)
• watch a game of virtual football being played by AI footballers
• hear how cybercriminals persuade others to trust them - and what we should watch out for
• learn about new software being developed to check the truth of claims made by politicians or in Wikipedia pages.

On our day of public events, we were showcasing some of the research that takes place here in areas from security to the environment, encompassing themes from robotics to artificial intelligence to natural language processing.  

As last year, we offered visitors the opportunity meet and interact with some of the robots being developed here. Researchers in the Department's Affective Intelligence and Robotics Lab are working to create emotionally intelligent robots that can help make us more resilient to life’s challenges. They were running three events during our Open Day:

• A 'robodiary' session with Pepper the robot
• A positive psychology session with a robot
• A meeting with Nao, the robot helping to assess mental wellbeing in children

Researchers working on environmental projects were running a session on:

• Seeing the woods for the trees: visualising environmental data

Visitors could also learn about the use and abuse of technology.

• Two sessions revealed how item-tracking devices (designed to find lost phones and keys) are used stalkers to track their targets and what can be done about this. The workshop on 'How Do You Know Where I Am? How Item-tracking devices are used for stalking' ran twice, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. 

Attendees on the day were able to visit the Prorok Lab and watch how a swarm of robots interacts with humans.

We also offered:

• tours of the Department
• a Computer Science and Technology film show. We'll have a series of short films about Computer Science and Technology and attendees can drop in and watch as many as they wish.

For more information about all the events taking place as part of the Cambridge Festival, please visit the Cambridge Festival website.