Late May sees the annual Pint of Science events take place in pubs (and other somewhat unusual venues) around Cambridge, the UK and indeed the rest of the world. Designed to combine the city’s love of learning with its love of libation, the event has grown more popular every year with new venues and themes popping up every which way you look. Covering every aspect of science, and arguably every nuance of drinking culture, these volunteer run events are a great way to learn and laugh simultaneously.
ARM is always keen to support the furthering of knowledge and share some of the wisdom of our experts with the masses. The recent announcement of our acquisition of Apical, Loughborough based imaging and vision gurus, gave us a whole new thing to talk about this year: computer vision. ARM Fellow and general legend Jem Davies was on hand at the Architect pub to talk about why he thinks this is such an important industry development. He explained the different approaches required to make the most of the information we can receive from computer vision as well as the difficulty of processing and somehow interpreting the overwhelming quantity of mobile data produced every day. With 3.7 exabytes of mobile data traffic every single month, and more than half of that being mobile video, it was eye opening to think about how we can possibly store it all, let alone view it and take anything meaningful from it.
Jem explained that whilst seeing and understanding images comes naturally to us, our fundamental lack of understanding about what actually happens in the brain means it’s very difficult to provide this ability to computers. Deep learning and neural networks can come into play here so we can effectively train the brain to understand what we’re showing it and why it’s important. This is where this mountain of data can come in handy because it acts as a textbook for the computer to learn about our world and begin to recognise it.
For example, Spirit™, part of the Apical product line, is a system which takes object recognition and expands upon it to extract huge amounts of valuable data. It recognises people even in crowded and confusing situations and can be used to help assess large groups and provide early warnings of suspicious activity or potential trouble. Just think how valuable something like this could be in spotting dangerous over-crowding on a subway platform or a collapsed reveller at a concert. Not only does computer vision and deep learning enable these possibilities, but it will also be key to the mainstream adoption of things like autonomous vehicles. It will be the mechanism to allow the vehicle to see what’s happening around it and make smart decisions for safety and efficiency. It soon became clear how many exciting opportunities this kind of technology presents and I for one can’t wait to see where we can take it next.
Meanwhile, across town at La Raza some of us were getting chemical with our educational evening. Molecular cocktails were the order of the day and we were shown some super cool techniques like Gelification (yes apparently it’s a word) which allows you to make solid cocktails with a range of different techniques, the miniature jelly long island iced tea being a highlight for me. We also had the opportunity to try ‘spherification’ or the technique by which you can make tasty fruity bubbles to add to a cocktail. Using a sodium alginate solution, you can cause a skin to form around a drop of fruit syrup (or similar) holding it together whilst still keeping the centre liquid. It was great to be able to have a go at it ourselves and see just how much fun science can be.
With Pint of Science events taking place all over the world I highly recommend you check them out next time they’re in town. Not only can you learn a lot but you can also have a lot of fun in the process. Initiatives like this are really helping open up the sciences to the masses and get a lot more people interested in the tech that makes our world work.