Markus Leutwyler - Hands on learning experience for non-technical people

The knowledge gap between engineers, designers and management is widening and becoming an obstacle for successful project completion. Artificial Intelligence and Robotics are viewed to be too complicated for non-technical people. It's time to bridge this gap by having everyone understand the topic and have hands-on experience. In this talk, I will prove that everyone can work with Robotics and Artificial Intelligence—namely, by showing how designers and management can learn about these important topics. When humans go into hands-on contact with technology they learn by experiencing the technology interactively („by doing“). Thus, instead of discussing complex mathematical formulas they learn with playful interactions. I will prove that even with a non-technical background, anyone can build a robot from scratch and install a trained neural network to its brain. In the talk, I will also show how humans learn about the strengths and weaknesses of methods learned through behaviour analysis of a robot. I will also show that humans even discover something about themselves when going through a hands-on learning process that incorporates aspects of emotional intelligence and curiosity—now considered top skills for the modern workplace.