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Gaëtan Robillard wins the British Computer Society (BCS) Futures Awards
This award was presented by the Lumen Prize for Art and Technology at a ceremony in London on the 19 th of October 2023.
With his research and creation project, Critical Climate Machine, Gaëtan Robillard, associate professor at the Gustave Eiffel University and head of year of the IMAC-ESIEE Paris course, received the “British Computer Society (BCS) Futures Awards”, an award presented by the Lumen Prize for Art and Technology at a ceremony in London on the 19th of October 2023.
" Critical Climate Machine is part of the MediaFutures project and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 framework programme for research and innovation. "
Critical Climate Machine
Critical Climate Machine is an installation that explores the misinformation on climate change that is spread on social media, using a graphic and sound representation of the data.
An AI is trained to identify and categorise the information, enabling the installation to process the collected data.
“ To do this, we used a special algorithm developed by cognitive science researchers, explains Gaëtan Robillard. “As far as deep learning was concerned, I was able to count on the help of Vincent Nozick, from LIGM*. The sound aspects were designed in collaboration with the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), who is overseeing the project as a MediaFutures Partner. ”
*LIGM : Gaspard Monge computer science laboratory - UMR CNRS 8049
Using artificial intelligence to combat climate misinformation
Initiated as part of Gaëtan Robillard’s thesis in aesthetics and art sciences, the Critical Climate Machine project was launched in 2021. The first steps was to understand how climate scepticism spreads through the media and the digital mechanisms at work. To enable the installation to process the data, an artificial intelligence was trained to analyse the
information. When the machine is very active, it overheats. In the form of a coloured map, the installation represents the temperature as a measure of the amount of online misinformation analysed in real time.
The IMAC engineering course
The aim of this course is to combine a creative spirit with scientific engineering training in the fields of new technologies (ICST, programming) and communication (audiovisual, graphics, digital, etc.).
Two students from the course took part in the design and IT development of this project. Another student took part in a teaching experiment and a series of debates on the climate. These debates were then recorded to produce the sound installation part of Critical Climate Machine.
IMAC course