A talk about the consequences of climate change and digitalization, an interesting Q&A about the definition of democracy and freedom and a research about fooling artificial intelligence. Look back at the highlights of festival day 3!

freedom for the wolf

From Hong Kong protests of 2014 to the Tunisian Revolution that spearheaded the Arab Spring, Freedom for The Wolf takes the viewer across five different countries to explore and challenge the notion of what is typically hard to define, that of freedom. As often happens with abstract concepts freedom has multiple definitions. “What is democracy and freedom for you?” was one of the first questions put to the film’s producer Patrick Hamm (Goethe Institut) during the Q&A.

“I prefer to think of democracy as an authentic representation of the people’s voice along with rights for minorities”

Another key question revolved around the role that anarchist movements can play in the current political landscape. Laura Henderson, legal philosopher and human rights lawyer, also participated in the Q&A. According to her, while the strength of such movements lies in a plurality of opinions, their strength also becomes their limitation, “no agenda that people can unite behind”.

This film will be shown on Sunday 11 November at 16:00 in LUX 3. Tickets available here.

jane

When Jane Goodall was 26, she traveled to Afrika to make her dream come true: living between animals. With a lot of patience and perseverance she won the trust of a group chimpanzees with the result she could do research about them. After the film PhD student Eva van Berlo (University of Leiden) explains her research on emotions and empathy of humans and monkeys. How do we differ? She did a few experiments with the audience and the conclusion was: we have to learn some things as well.

This film will be shown on Sunday 11 November at 15:45 in LUX 4. Tickets are available here.

philipp blom / what is at stake?

A happy pessimist. It may sound weird, but Philipp Blom is a historian looking into the future. The question he asked is: how will a young historian in 50 years look back at our society now? We look back at the first World War and we feel morally better than the people back then. Will it be different in the future? Will the young historian think: they saw the problems of climate change and digitization but did nothing about it. Blom called himself a happy pessimist but emphasizes the possibility our attempts to change the world are coming too late.

can you fool artificial intelligence?

Ever found yourself seeing faces in inanimate objects? That plug socket has eyes and a mouth, so does that tree trunk, we do it all the time. This is because we have evolved to be good at detecting faces, a characteristic we think of as very human.

We have been teaching technology to do the same. Face recognition software is now becoming commonplace in our society and is immensely useful. It can help us improve tagging on social media, taking selfies and even our security.

But of course, technology can’t be as good as us. We’ve all seen technology frequently get it wrong. It mistakenly thinks that those dimples in that tree trunk are actually a face, whereas we know better.

However, technology has rapidly improved and the way that machines learn has become incredibly advanced – do they still make these silly mistakes? Is it still easy to fool Artificial Intelligence?

Here in the library at InScience, Researchers from the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour are challenging you to see if you can trick their face recognition software. You have many types of masks and patterns at your disposal to try and fox the system, pretty easy, right? But this software can detect arms and elbows so you need to do more than just covering your face – Good Luck.

Photos by Almicheal Fraay and Vera van Nuenen.