Know-Center in dialogue with youth at IMAGINE17 conference

Carla Barreiros from the Ubiquitous Personal Computing Team at Know-Center was one of seven invited researchers who took part in the fti…remixed speeddating, engaging in dialogue with about 40 students from Vienna to present their various research areas.

In this special “Speeddating” event format, young people discuss scientific, research and career topics with experts in a small, personal setting. After a short presentation the participating researchers each had two minutes to present their own research area on the basis of a research item they brought along. Afterwards, the students formed small groups and switched from table to table in intervals of eight minutes, with an expert at each table answering their questions.

As a researcher in the area of ​​Big Data Analytics, Carla Barreiros makes data visible and understandable. To this end, she presented her current research project at the Know-Center called “BioIot – Communicating sensory data from an augmented reality“. In this project, data from a coffee machine sensor is visualized using a tree. If the coffee machine lacks water, the virtual tree loses leaves. This is a simple comprehensible tool for visualizing machine maintenance and errors. With the aid of a smartphone and a plastic pyramid, she showed a hologram from the project to let the students experience the research topic at hand. The goal of this project is to provide information about complex real-time processes in an appealing, interactive and easy-to-understand manner. The presentation should be aesthetically pleasing and improve the overall well-being of the workplace.

In retrospect, this event was a positive experience for all participants and a good opportunity to get feedback from younger generations while observing their interests in this context. The students were all very interested in the research done at Know-Center, which was particularly noticeable by the many questions asked concerning the used technologies such as Augmented Reality, Unity, Arduino and Microsoft Hololens.

In addition, the Know-Center was also present at the Austrian Computer Science Day 2017, which was held within the context of the IMAGINE17 conference as well.  Managing director Stefanie Lindstaedt gave valuable technical with her presentation on “Knowledge-based Models and Data-Based Approaches”  within the track “Why we do not find anything in Big Data. And why safe ICT is difficult to achieve.”, as was reported in previous Know-Center news.