EventsFebruary 1, 2018

Meeting the World in Davos

If I tell you it happens every year in January, in the mountains of Switzerland, you may think snow – and there was a lot there – but that is not what I have in mind. If I reveal that this is a meeting where approximately 2,500 people discuss the matters of the world would you be able to guess? I am thinking about the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. For the second year, ETH Zurich was present at the WEF in a pavillon designed around the theme “RETHINKING Intelligence” in the Hockey Club Davos. As a Ph.D candidate at the Institute of Neuroinformatics (University of Zurich and ETH-Zurich), I had the chance to be part of this adventure for a week!

The presence of ETH in Davos was a fantastic opportunity for a diverse audience of people with broad interests to learn more about us. ETH Zurich opened its doors in the mountains so that the WEF could meet the ETH culture, its people, and find out what’s going on in the labs! School students, investors, tech companies, and economists, as well as researchers, university reps, local and international politicians, in fact, all kinds of curious people came to the ETH exhibition. There were six projects that illustrate the type of research we are doing on artificial intelligence, neuro-science, and robotics.

In case you were not able to attend, let me give you a virtual tour!

The exhibition logo was designed around the idea of fluid meets crystalline intelligence. In our terms, this is how adaptation and learning of the brain leads to the acquisition of skills, knowledge, memories.

Visitors enter through a tunnel and are invited to describe what intelligence means for them by placing lego bricks into different concepts.

Then, they arrive with a view over a 3D printed brain and a chance to navigate through the brain’s capability for making associations, decisions, social interactions (using Augmented reality).

The RETHINKING intelligence pavillon illustrates how the artificial intelligence and robotics research of ETH leads to the design of intelligent technologies. We presented optical illusions showing how the mind can be tricked and how those teach us about perception: from the eye to the brain.

Dextra, the hand that can beat you at the Rock – Paper – Scissors game is an example using such technologies. Its silicon retina developed by the group of Prof. Delbruck at the Institute of Neuroinformatics is inspired by our understanding of processing in the eye.

The demonstrations of ANYmal from the group of Prof. Hutter and the Robotic Systems Lab had a lot of success with children as well as with the federal councillor of the Swiss Confederation…

The Cybathlon was also present, demonstrating a game in which you race with an avatar whose speed depends on your attention as measured by a device that can “read your mind”!

The exhibition was more than just demonstrating research and technology, I had the opportunity to meet school kids from the Swiss Alpine Middle School in Davos..

as well as Alois, the Prince of Liechtenstein, playing Dextra with ETH Zurich’s President Lino Guzzella…

…and Swiss Federal Councillor, Doris Leuthard who stopped by to support the new mobility initiative between ETH and SBB.

While the days involved long hours of work and special events, the TasteLab – an ETH spinoff founded by chemists, engineers, and physicists who have a shared love of food – delighted our tastebuds…

…and made our stay in Davos, meeting the world, even more worthwhile.

By Julien Martel

Julien Martel is a Ph.D student at ETH Zürich, working at the Institute of Neuroinformatics in the Cortical Computation Group led by Dr. Matthew Cook. His main research interests lie in artificial vision and machine intelligence, particularly in the design of novel algorithms for unconventional visual sensors.