From November 2024, explore the interactive exhibition //DataSpaces. Experience science. In guided tours and workshops, high school students from grade 8 upwards can get to grips with current research at TU Dresden on the subject of digital sciences and experience current research live. Try out numerous applications and playfully discover how AI systems work or the mathematics behind complex systems, and discuss ethical issues relating to data traces and data protection. More information will be available here shortly.

On July 25th, the students of the complex internship in the summer semester 2024 presented their results from the work of the last few months. They designed interactive media stations on the themes of the //DataSpaces exhibition. They created a chatbot with different characters, an evaluation of visitors' data traces from Lidar sensors, an interactive map with computer science locations in Dresden, an installation with masks that react to visitors, a playful guide to building a high-performance computing server and a station for trying out old punched tape technology while programming.

The Interactive Science Lab offered an exclusive sneak peak of the upcoming exhibition //DataSpaces at the Long Night of Science on June 14, 2024. Visitors who came to the Andreas-Pfitzmann-Bau were able to discover two interactive exhibits before the exhibition opened and find out what a sandbox has to do with swarms or how computing processes can be represented in a supercomputer.

For the nationwide Digital Day 2024, the Interactive Science Lab organized a “Speeddating with the digital sciences” at the COSMO Science Forum. Interested visitors were able to talk to scientists from the digital sciences and try out interactive applications. The Digital Day was launched to promote digital participation in Germany. The aim is to bring people closer to digital developments and make them understandable so that they can benefit from them. In this way, digitalization becomes part of the reality of life and can be discussed, understood and experienced together.

In April 2024, Monika Reich from the Interactive Science Lab held a workshop on the topic of data worlds and artificial intelligence with students from Gymnasium Klotzsche. The workshop took place as part of the 10th grade project week “No Utopia”. Together, the students developed an analog algorithm and addressed the question of whether artificial intelligence is always good or always bad.

In the Data//Art complex internship course in winter semester 2023/24, students developed visualizations for processes and calculations that run in supercomputers under the guidance of Brian Eschrich. They useed data from the ZIH supercomputer cluster at TU Dresden. This is used for data analysis, machine learning and the processing of large data sets. All these processes take place unnoticed in a huge, windowless concrete cube. The students transformed these invisible processes into artistic, tangible forms and structures. A student project is currently being revised and adapted for the “//DataSpaces” exhibition.

In 2023, the CIDS Interactive Science Lab team traveled to various museums, science centers and exhibition venues in Germany and Austria to find inspiration for the CIDS exhibition. This resulted in numerous contacts, including the ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica, Experimenta Heilbronn and the Deutsches Museum Nuremberg. For example, the ZKM Karlsruhe showed the exhibit “TRACES” by Bernd Lintermann. This is currently being adapted for the exhibition //DataSpaces.

In November 2023, the CIDS Interactive Science Lab presented the concept of its exhibition at the EVA conference in Berlin, which was titled “Transform”. The lecture on “Data Spaces // Data Worlds: Changing Perspectives with Artistic Support” and the presentation of an interactive exhibit focused on the change of perspective offered by the exhibition.

From September 2023 to January 2024, the COSMO Science Forum in the Kulturpalast Dresden hosted an exhibition and accompanying program on the topic of artificial intelligence. ScaDS.AI was represented with three exhibits. ScaDS.AI will also be represented with several exhibits in the “//DataSpaces” exhibition at the CIDS Interactive Science Lab.

In the fall of 2023, the Interactive Science Lab team tested a system for real-time recording of movements in space. Based on the TRACES project by Bernd Lintermann at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, LiDAR sensors are set up to scan the room and software is used that can display the movement data in heat maps, for example.

The ScaDS.AI program asan.AI will be part of the “//DataSpaces” exhibition from autumn 2024. The application is currently being adapted for this. For the Long Night of Science 2023, ScaDS.AI presented asanAI, an interactive station for testing and trying out artificial intelligence in the COSMO Science Forum. The application was evaluated by the users. This data is now helping with the revision. You can try out asanAI for yourself at the following link.

The pilot exhibition of the CIDS Interactive Science Lab is supported by a TUD im Dialog grant. As places of knowledge and its communication, universities have a responsibility to communicate and make their research topics understandable outside the scientific community and to discuss them with an interested public audience. The exhibition aims to connect scientists and, above all, inform and educate citizens about the possibilities, limits, opportunities and risks of digitalization for society. The exhibition will act as a knowledge and exchange platform.