The 16th edition of the Barcelona Science Festival, held on June 10 and 11, included the participation of La Salle-URL, which through a group of researchers organized two activities for children and young people to find out the perception of the world of robots and how noise pollution affects people.
- How does noise pollution affect us? What is sound and how does it affect us?
La Salle-URL researchers Leticia Duboc, Ester Vidaña and Rosa Ma. Alsina organized and led this workshop. The different environmental noises and their effects on human health were discussed. The young participants were able to experiment with a sound level meter, listen to environmental sounds and identify them. In addition, they were explained how SmartSound technology works, which uses audio processing algorithms and artificial intelligence to automatically identify different types of sounds, and their possible applications were discussed.
- How do robots perceive the world?
Coordinated and led by La Salle-URL researchers Raquel Ros, Leticia Duboc and Claudia Serrano, the workshop reflected on robots and their limited ability to perceive and interpret the world. Through various sensory experiments, the capabilities of the robots were put to the test*.
The Barcelona Science Festival, organized by the Barcelona City Council, is Barcelona's great citizen event with science and research. As in previous editions, it had more than 170 activities that talked about topics such as climate change, robotics, artificial intelligence, mathematics, the world of data, astronomy, archaeology, health, nanotechnology, culture maker and other transversal aspects such as gender issues or the interrelationship between art and science.
* The workshop is linked to an initiative funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of the Government of Spain - State Research Agency with the aid nº PID2020-119725GA-I00 (PID2020-119725GA-I00 / AEI / 10.13039/501100011033) for the project "Self-adaptive cross-modal perception in cognitive robotics" (CMES).
