Open Day at Amsterdam Science Park
Discover more, online and on location
Discover more about the secrets of the universe or the surprising properties of smart materials during one of the lectures. Or take a look behind the scenes, for example in the greenhouses where plants are grown for research during a guided tour.
Due to the corona measures, there are a limited number of places available for both the live lectures and the guided tours, so sign up quickly. But this year you can also visit the Open Day from home for the first time! The lectures are streamed, and can therefore also be followed from home on the couch.
The Open Day of Amsterdam Science Park is a collaboration between Amsterdam Science Park (Science & Business Foundation), AMOLF , ARCNL , AUC , CWI , Netherlands eScience Center , Nikhef , SURF and UvA-FNWI and is part of the Weekend of Science.
CWI lectures during the Open Day
During the Open Day, two CWI staff, Tijs van der Storm and Steven Pemberton, will give a lecture in the Turing Hall. These lectures will also be streamed.
12.30-13.00 Steven Pemberton (lecture in English): The Internet of Things and the Coming Robot Rebellion
Technological changes in society seem to be accelerating: in fact you can go back tens of thousands of years and discover an alarming pattern: they are accelerating at an exponential rate. If they were once happening every 100 years, then after 100 years, they were happening every 50 years, and then every 25 years. If you follow this line, you see that it converges on a time, apparently not too far in the future, where paradigm shifts are happening daily.
Can this really be? One suggestion is that that is the point where computers become smarter than us, and it is the computers doing the design, not us. By then, the whole world will be interconnected by the internet of things; will we be ready for a world where we are no longer the smartest? Will computers remain at our service?
And can we prepare in time? There were already warnings in the 60s about the impending climate crisis, and we are still not really doing anything. We are fundamentally slow-moving. What are the chances we can prepare for the AI crisis in time?
15.30-16.00 Tijs van der Storm (lecture in Dutch): Live programming: programming as modeling
Programming is writing down instructions (the source code) that the computer then executes. While the program is running you sometimes discover errors in the source code, you fix them, and you start the program again. This is a bit like archery: you aim, shoot, and if you miss, you start again.
What if you never have to stop the program, and it always keeps running while programming? Then you could save time in understanding what your program does. This is called “live programming”: while you are programming you get continuous feedback about the behaviour of your program.