Detective work in cyberspace: Exhibition ship “MS Wissenschaft” shows Saarbrücken research project

The exhibition on artificial intelligence invites its participants to interact. Picture: Ilja Hendel / Wissenschaft im Dialog

With a participatory exhibition on artificial intelligence, “MS Wissenschaft” is touring 27 cities in Germany. From July 31 to August 4, the exhibition ship will anchor in Saarbrücken near the Congresshalle. Among others, an exhibit from the Saarland Informatics Campus is on board. It shows how artificial intelligence can support detective work in cyberspace. The interactive exhibition is open daily from 10 am to 7 pm. Admission is free. The Filmhaus-Kino will also be showing the documentary film “Pre-Crime”.

Christian Rossow, Professor at Saarland University and researcher at the CISPA – Helmholtz Center for Information Security, and his team are researching the basis for an early warning system against mass attacks from the Internet. So far, these have often only been noticed too late. Then millions of inquiries overload online services within a very short time and paralyze them for hours. According to information from the Federal Office for Information Security, such mass attacks already accounted for 18 percent of successful attacks in Germany at the beginning of 2018. The exhibit shows how much mass attacks threaten our everyday lives by displaying current attacks in real time on a world map. It thus deals with research questions such as: Where and whom do these attacks come from? How can available information be used to fend them off or minimize their impact? The answers to these questions form the foundation for the use of artificial intelligence against such attacks.

While “MS Wissenschaft” is anchored in Saarbrücken, “Kino im Filmhaus” will be showing the 90-minute documentary film “Pre-Crime” from 2017 (rated for ages six and up). It was directed by Monika Hielscher and Matthias Heeder. The documentary deals with the case where software predicts where and when a criminal will strike. What sounds like a science fiction scenario is already reality in cities like Chicago, London and Munich. The method is called predictive policing. It processes the quantities of data that citizens themselves generate. The film therefore raises the questions of how much freedom society gives up for the promise of absolute freedom and how reliable the judgement of the calculation methods is. Following the film, Andreas Sensing from the Institute for Legal Informatics at Saarland University will provide scientific expertise on this topic.

The tour and exhibition is taking place on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. After Germany, the former coal freighter will visit Austria. The exhibition poses the following questions, among others: How does artificial intelligence change our communication and our working world? What consequences does it have for each and every one of us and for living together in our society? What limits should there be for AI systems? In addition, the exhibition provides insights into the possibilities of artificial intelligence and shows where it is already part of our everyday lives today. Visitors can try out for themselves what artificial intelligence can achieve. They can, for example, help to train such a system or take part in a simulated ride in an autonomous car. In a quiz, AI professionals and AI novices are invited to test their knowledge of artificial intelligence.

Background Saarland Informatics Campus:
800 scientists and about 1900 students from 81 nations make the Saarland Informatics Campus (SIC) one of the leading locations for computer science in Germany and Europe. Six globally renowned research institutes, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science, the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, the Center for Bioinformatics, the Cluster of Excellence for Multimodal Computing and Interaction and the CISPA – Helmholtz Center for Information Security, three networked faculties and 18 courses of study cover the entire spectrum of computer science.

Further information:
About “MS Wissenschaft”
https://ms-wissenschaft.de/

Documentary film “Pre-Crime”
https://www.filmhaus-sb.de/event/77877

Editor:
Gordon Bolduan
Competence Center Computer Science Saarland
Saarland Informatics Campus E1.7
Phone 0681/302-70741
Email: bolduan@mmci.uni-saarland.de