This year edition of Pint of Science, the unique festival that brings free science in local pubs all over the world, involved Switzerland for the first time and Innovation Forum Lausanne joined its team for one night!

Last week, researchers from the area pitched their research topics in front of people from Lausanne and surroundings in their favourite pubs: Le Lab du Dr. Gab’s, Sidewalk Cafè and A La Bossette. Every night different talks animated the bars and every night was a success: from Monday 20th to Wednesday 22nd May 2019, people crowded the three pubs to discover new things and enjoy informal science while drinking good beers.

During the last day, Innovation Forum Lausanne, who partnered-up with Pint of Science for the first year, hosted an evening at the Lab du Dr. Gab’s. Accompanied by great artisan beer, the audience listened to an inspirational talk by Dr. Luca Randazzo and a fun introduction to the combination of satire and machine learning with Prof. Bob West.

Luca, a freshly graduated PhD from the laboratory of Prof. Millan (EPFL) and now in the BioRob laboratory of Prof. Ijspeert, presented his dream of using the engineering skills he learned to make real and usable solutions to help disabled people. Starting from his personal story, he pursued his doctoral thesis on brain-computer interface combined with an agile exoskeleton. Now, he is translating it into a viable start-up: Yago.

The next talk delighted us with some laugh while Bob showed us which elements make a headline satire and which ones make it more serious, instead. A machine is now learning to detect this discrimination automatically and transform a serious sentence into a satirical one. We suggest you to check out more about his unfun.me project.

The evening concluded with the ultimate Pictionary battle between the audience and a trained machine. Maybe the technology for drawing was not the greatest, maybe our drawers were not the best artists, or maybe the audience got too excited for the prizes at stake (the famous Dr. Gabs beers)… but the machine always won. Do you accept the challenge? Test it here!