Idiap opens its doors to school children during the “Oser tous les métiers” day

After a short introduction, the Idiap staff presented to the children the different types of professions reunited within the Idiap Research Institute. The young visitors were of course familiar with the most known of them: “researcher”. Yet, they discovered that it takes a whole bunch of other professions surrounding the one of researcher to make a research institute function well: IT engineers, project managers, finance managers, etc.

However, the most interesting part for them was, without any doubt, the 4 demonstrations: Baxter, Idiap's new robot, the Showroom, the datacenter in the basement of the institute and Nao, the little robot.

During the afternoon, the young visitors were able to build different types of “LEGO robots” and then, with the help of a simple software allowing them to “write” their own little program, to command the robot. We were able to see alligators eating little LEGO pieces, birds dancing or ships moving in the wind... the imagination of the children was without any limit.