Czech Centre London

Global Science Café: Pandemic and other Challenges. With Josef Průša. Chaired by Guy Borg

A live stream from Prague with With Josef Průša, Chaired by Guy Borg on Pandemic and other Challenges.
Thursday 21 May 2020, 5 pm BST
More at https://bit.ly/36CKbHi

As the world continues to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the main focuses has been to enhance additive manufacturing, commonly known as 3-D printing, as a way to help provide as many medical supplies as possible, especially personal protective equipment (PPE). In terms of global efforts, Prusa Research, a Czech company and the world’s second-largest manufacturer of 3-D printers, is playing a significant role in this process. Tune into our online Global Science Café with Josef Průša to learn more!

With the recent COVID-19 outbreak, the Prusa Research company is actively involved in producing protective face shields using the 3-D printing technique. The open-source 3D printing code has been provided free of charge to the entire 3D global printing community. Moreover, Prusa Research has donated thousands of protective shields to hospitals, general practitioners, emergency departments, orthodontists, pharmacies, police forces, teachers and other professionals around the world.

Josef Průša, born in Havlíčkův Brod in 1990, is a 3-D printer developer and owner of Prusa Research. He was a student of Applied Informatics at the University of Economics, Prague, and started designing 3-D printers when he was 19. After having built his first 3-D printer in 2012 under the name “Prusa Mendel”, he founded the Prusa Research company, and thereby introduced the world of 3-D printing to a much wider public. His business was built upon the RepRap project (short for replicating rapid prototyper) – an open-source desktop 3-D printer that is capable of partial self-replication. At present, Josef Průša gives public lectures on 3-D printing and open-source hardware. He also teaches Arduino at Prague’s Charles University.

Part of the GLOBAL SCIENCE CAFÉ SERIES Global Science Café is a series of popular science presentations and talks by the best Czech scientists, innovators, economists and other notable figures of today presented by the Czech Centres around the world. It is basically an informal forum for the discussion of various scientific and social issues. All events are currently held online and their content is being shared within the network. 

#czechculturetotheworld

Science Café: FreMEn - How to join the fight against the Coronavirus

How to minimise people’s potential exposure to the COVID-19 infection? Listen into our online Science Café with Tomas Krajnik to learn more information!

Tomáš Krajník and his team from Czech Technical University (CTU) is developing an app which forecasts the density of people in public areas. Based on the data, you can then plan your visits or journeys accordingly and schedule necessary trips to supermarkets or pharmacies, for instance, for later.

All of this while respecting privacy of the users as the app is built on crowd-sourced anonymous data and also while taking to account local customs and patterns of human behaviour.

The Czech project combines principles known in medical science, artificial intelligence and chronorobotics. Krajnik and his team works with spatio-temporal models which can predict future people’s densities at various locations with epidemiologic models which can estimate the transmission and exposure risks. The resulting method will be able to predict the future risk of virus exposure at different locations and times, allowing the public to avoid these areas. This will lead to reduction of the risk of individual exposure and subsequently, to the reduction of the spread of the virus.

Limiting direct contact between people and large-scale testing is so far the only efficient measure to curb the outbreak. However, drastic approaches like city lockdowns, travel bans, school and office closures, cannot be in effect indefinitely, as they would result in an economic breakdown. Furthermore, the effects of the long-term isolation on the human behaviour and mental health of the population could be severe.

This new tool could potentially influence human behaviour so that the techniques of social distancing are efficient, sensitive and balance the exposure risk, individual welfare, social health, and economic efficiency. 

More at: https://bit.ly/2VHo0Mn

AI Science Café Series 2020: Mobility - is autonomous driving an answer to reducing traffic congestion in our cities? With Michal Čáp

Cities are overly congested with traffic and pollution. At present the most widely discussed solution is urban on-demand mobility based self-driving technology. The envisioned automated mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems employ a centrally-controlled fleet of self-driving vehicles to provide on-demand point-to-point transportation to the users of the system. Such systems promise to revolutionise user behaviour and significantly improve the efficiency of urban transportation. As a case study, Michal Čáp discusses and quantify the potential for car-sharing and ride-sharing to reduce the number of vehicles in the city of Prague, its application to other cities around the world and the implications for policy making. 

Michal Pěchouček on Personal security in the age of AI.

We're bringing you an interview with the Chief Technology Officer at Avast Michal Pěchouček, recorded as part of our AI SCIENCE CAFÉ SERIES 2020.  

Michal Pěchouček leads the core technology and R&D teams and is also responsible for Avast’s scientific research in the field of artificial intelligence, machine learning and cybersecurity. He also lectures at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague and leads the Artificial Intelligence Centre which he founded in 2001. He has co-founded several technology start-ups, including Cognitive Security, AgentFly Technologies and Blindspot Solutions.

The objective of the AI Science Café series consists of five presentations by high profile, world acclaimed experts, is to introduce, present and publicly discuss various topics that impact our professional as well as our personal lives - https://bit.ly/2xtYnW0 

 

AI Science Café Series 2020: Personal security in the age of AI. With Michal Pěchouček

Due to the complexities and related risks provided by the ubiquitous deployment of AI there is an ever increasing need to provide users with security and privacy, while living online and surrounded by connected devices. Michal Pěchouček debates the current and future role of #AI, namely machine learning and game theory, AI-enabled cybersecurity problems and how AI can help to increase user privacy and safety from AI algorithms both online and in the physical world.