Artificial Intelligence is everywhere. We find it in algorithms prioritising your social media feed, Chat-GPT revising your writing, or your satnav taking you where you need to be. But how does it work? In this session, we explored some of the principles behind AI, and some of the ways it can fail. We also explored the computing infrastructure that underpins AI and its hunger for high-end computing and extensive energy consumption. We were joined by a stand from the Northern Ireland High-Performance Computing Centre (https://www.ni-hpc.ac.uk/) with whom we have a joint project on making high-performance computing more energy-efficient.

The activity directly links to our ongoing research on high-performance computing, edge and cloud computing, artificial intelligence and its application to predicting disease outbreaks. Our PhD researchers and post-docs organised demos aiming to explain key notions in computing to the general public. The event was well attended with about 40-50 participants, ranging from school-going youth to pensioners, including IT professionals and interested members of the public.