CONCYS in Portas Abertas

The annual event UFRGS Portas Abertas took place on every campi of the university on Saturday, May 19. The rainy day didn’t scare away the public, and over eight thousand visitors, coming from 275 schools attended on all the five campi, accordingly to the event’s website. The event’s idea is to expose research fields each institute work on, so high school students can visit to form a solid opinion on what course they may take on the next few years, or simply to get to know the University’s facilities. Participating for the first time on the event’s 16th edition, the group CONCYS was set up in amphitheater 108 of the Institute of Informatics, Campus do Vale, providing practical activities for visitors to experience. The campus opened its rooms, amphitheaters and laboratories so nothing could pass by unnoticed by the visitors.

The CONCYS’s main goal was to connect with people who would like to understand what type of advances we aim to accomplish. For that, the group organized simple activities, and anyone could interact. Since both AlienWare 17 with Tobii eye-tracker embedded and openBCI’s Cyton hardware are great for exposure in such event, we had enough motivation to elaborate simple tasks with these equipment so participants could entertain themselves while learning. Not only they could enjoy a match on Tobbi’s eyetracker tutorial but also see their heartbeat on a notebook’s screen, collected with the openBCI’s electrodes placed on their wrists. These interactions served as great bound between CONCYS and the students so we could explain the importance of collecting such data and what we can do with it, always priming for interdisciplinarity. We could also focus on the explanation of theoretical basis of eye-tracking and electroencephalogram’s experiments.

From 8:30h in the morning to 1:30h in the afternoon people participated, interacted or listened to the talks, and many showed much interest in the research fields CONCYS work, understanding the meaning of open source research and how to think creatively to solve problems or look for answers. After the ending, the group looks forward for next successful opportunities such as this to spread what we can learn from computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence, thus approximating research to people in general.