Idiap opens its doors to school children during the “Osez 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 demonstration of our NAO robot and the different demos in the showroom: the children were curious, asking many “very pertinent” questions.
During the afternoon, the children were able to build a “LEGO robot” and then control it with the help of a computer: a simple software allowed them to “write” their own little program to command the robot.
The children finished their day with the visit of the datacenter in the basement of the institute, where they saw that research in Computer Engineering is supported by numerous “machines” and “kilometers of cables”.