Science festival in Bordeaux: discovering digital sciences

The trial of artificial intelligence - Friday, October 1 

This animation takes its participants to the Macropolis of Bordeaux, in 2050, which has been secretly governed for a few years by an artificial intelligence. When the truth is discovered, a trial is set up to find out what the inhabitants want: to be ruled by a human or by an artificial intelligence. Under the guise of a mediation exercise that will involve many scientists from various backgrounds (neuroscience, economics ...), this fictional trial will be an opportunity to discover many themes and question them. Nicolas Rougier and Frédéric Alexandre from the MNEMOSYNE project team will represent the Inria Center of Bordeaux during this animation.

The "Circuit scientifique bordelais" - Monday 4 to Friday 8 October

Like every year, the "Circuit scientifique bordelais" invites many high school students to come and meet the scientists of the Bordeaux campus. This year again, due to current health reasons, the "Circuit scientifique bordelais" will be held "Outside the walls" and our scientists will go directly to meet the future budding scientists in their schools. The program will include animations, workshops, a career forum and much more. Five scientists will represent the Inria center of Bordeaux during this event: 

• Monday, October 4 - Lycée Max Linder, Libourne (33): Brice Goglin, from the TADAAM project team and Vincent Padois, from the AUCTUS project team, will present an animation "Chiche!"
• Thursday, October 7 - Cité scolaire Giraut de Borneil, Excideuil (24) : Emmanuelle Saillard, from the STORM project team and Clémence Frioux, from the PLEIADE project team, will present the animations "La grande pyramide d'Egypte", "Les ateliers débranchés" and "Chiche!"
• Friday, October 8 - Lycée les Iris, Lormont (33) : Christele Etchegaray, from the MONC project team and Vincent Padois, from the AUCTUS project team, will present an animation "Chiche!"

The Science Village of Cap Sciences 

This year, the Science Village of Cap Sciences will be placed under the theme of critical thinking! Through workshops, animations, conferences and meetings with the scientific actors of the Region, young and old will be able to test their critical spirit and that of our researchers!

Clément Romac and Rémy Portelas from the FLOWERS project team will present the animation "The school of robots". Equipped with their small robots over-trained to move in a virtual environment thanks to AI technology, the public will confront them with numerous challenges in order to test their adaptation capacities.

30 Scientists Live

For the 30th anniversary of the French Science festival, the "Rectorat de Bordeaux" and the four centers of scientific, technical and industrial culture of the region (Cap Sciences, Récréa Sciences, Lacq Odyssée and Espace Mendes France) are proposing an action to propose interventions of 30 researchers in middle and high school classes. These interventions will be placed under the themes "30 years ago, what was it like?" and "What's new in my lab" in order to retrace the history of the different research themes and methodologies. 

Yves Coudière from the CARMEN project team and Raymond Namyst from the STORM project team will take part in the game with 2 classes of secondary school, from Friday, October 1 to Monday, October 11.

Science festival special article in The Conversation 

This year, The conversation decided to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the French science festival. For this occasion, the article "Les avatars peuvent-ils remplacer notre corps" by Adélaïde Genay from the POTIOC team has been selected. 

The summary: Augmented Reality allows us to see and manipulate holograms integrated in our daily environment. Thanks to it, it is possible to interact with distant people in the form of 3D avatars, but also to modify one's own appearance by covering one's body with a virtual texture. Several researches have shown that such modifications can have a direct impact on our perception and behavior: for example, the virtual change of their skin color can lead to a decrease of ethnic bias in participants. We sought to better understand the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, called the "Proteus Effect".  To do so, we conducted an experiment comparing the perception of virtual robot hands in three contexts of Augmented Reality environments: one containing real objects only, one containing virtual objects only, one containing a mixture of both. Overall, our analyses show that the perception of the environment seems to play a subtle but determining role in the illusion of embodying an avatar.