MeetMeTonight: Bocconi Unveils the Secrets of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence

THE MILAN EDITION OF THE EUROPEAN RESEARCHERS' NIGHT OPENS TOMORROW. BOCCONI'S ACTIVITIES WILL COVER MACHINE LEARNING AND THE RISKS OF A DEMOCRACY BEING HACKED

Bocconi is again the main partner of MeetMeTonight (Giardini Indro Montanelli, Friday 27 and Saturday 28 September), the Milanese edition of the European Researchers' Night, and articulates its presence in a permanent stand and a talk, connected by the red thread of big data and artificial intelligence.
 
The activity of the Bocconi stand is called Machine learning: how machines learn from data. It is a journey into the world of artificial intelligence: through moments of interaction, games and questionnaires, visitors approach the themes of machine learning in a simple and engaging way. In the part reserved for schools (Friday, 10am-3pm), students will be asked to create a neural network and understand how it works by revisiting the Chinese whispers (or telephone) game. Each student will become a node and together they will learn to communicate as a neural network.
 
During the rest of the time, two educational games are planned. In the first (Guess the tweets!) the participants will be presented with three characters and a list of their tweets. Afterwards, an anonymous tweet will appear and participants will have to challenge the machines in guessing which of the characters is the author and, above all, how you can understand it. In the A.I. Cube, participants will be equipped with a webcam and the ability to communicate directly with a machine in order to train it to respond to various inputs.
 
Gaia Rubera, a Full Professor of Marketing who teaches, among other things, coding in Python and Deep learning for computer vision, will hold a talk at 6:30pm on Saturday 28, reflecting on technology and current affairs. The speech, From big data to artificial intelligence: is it possible to hack a democracy?, aims to highlight the possible risks for democracy deriving from the combination of big data and artificial intelligence. The case of Cambridge Analytica, the use of social bots during election campaigns and the latest advances in facial recognition and deepfake technology will be discussed.

by Fabio Todesco