KInIT at the European Researcher’s Night 2024

On September 27, the Old Market Hall in Bratislava became the home of science for the European Researcher’s Night, the biggest science festival in Slovakia, connecting researchers and innovators with the public in an inspiring and unique way. The festival is traditionally held on the last Friday of September in Bratislava, Košice, Banská Bystrica, Žilina, Poprad, and other accompanying locations. The day-long program offers a series of scientific presentations, discussions, workshops and other activities.

We are grateful to attend this event regularly, and we always have a fantastic time! This year, KInIT was also an active part of the main stage program. Our researcher and head of the NLP team, Marián Šimko, opened the event with a talk on chatbots and the development of artificial intelligence. During the talk, he presented the pitfalls of using chatbots, the spread of misinformation on social media and strategies for avoiding it. 

One of the priorities of our institute is educating young people about modern technologies and AI systems. That’s why we were pleased to see that the audience consisted mainly of students, who created a joyful and inspiring atmosphere. We are thankful for their active participation throughout the lecture.

We also talked about AI offstage, our researcher Andrea Hrčková organized a critical thinking workshop for the visitors. We prepared a challenge that professional fact-checkers face every day: “Is this article true? Where is it wrong?” All participants worked in teams and used large language models for their evaluation. This interactive activity led to an analysis of the results with a tool for professional fact-checkers.

The KInIT booth was full of research spirit, offering visitors the chance to explore and try out a wide variety of our activities, such as: word game HádAI, automatic diacritics completion tool via AI Diakritikovač, tool for finding already verified facts Fact-checker finder or tool for creating a social media post from a research article Quickrepost. AI enthusiasts were also interested in what it’s like to work at our institute, internship opportunities, and information about our European projects.

European Researcher’s Night was a great occasion to present our research projects to the public. Our researchers talked about their groundbreaking findings in these projects:

We would like to thank the organizers for supporting science and research in Slovakia and all visitors for their interest in our work. We can’t wait to celebrate European Researcher’s Night together again next year!