SHARPER Night 2023

Segmentation and Pose estimation on YOLOv8 demonstration at SHARPER Night 2023

SHARPER (SHAring Researchers’ Passion for Enhanced Roadmaps) Night, the night of European researchers, was held on 29 September 2023. A disclosure event where the Italian and European universities, united by scientific dissemination, showed to the public current research state of the art to introduce citizens to local scientific research activities.

Although I am not a perfect entertainer and a great crowd-pleaser, I participated together with other PhD students at this event. I put into practice the simplest communication techniques known to me to try to attract and explain to a non-specialist audience some problems or tasks that artificial intelligence can solve.

With not much surprise, I noticed how people are attracted by the unknown, with a mixture of human beings such as disappointment and fear.

More specifically, we had a workstation with 4 monitors where we showed four different tasks:

• XrayGPT: GPT applied to Xray, with the capability to have a conversation with an AI agent acting as a doctor;
• Stable Diffuson: a Webui for diffusion models capable to generate images by text prompting;
• MIDGARD: an open-source simulatior for autonomous robot navigation in outdoor unstructured environments;
• YOLOv8: an object detection and tracking, instance segmentation, image classification and pose estimation architecture.

The tasks showed with YOLOv8, segmentation and pose estimation, greatly attracted the public, between children and adults who tried to understand what it was really used for. And in fact, let’s not forget a fundamental point, research activity must always serve something (or someone ça va sans dire). A little awkwardly and with a bit of freestyle at the end, we managed to explain the underlying technology to the audience, including older people. In fact, older people, who hold wisdom asked why we make these research activities, because “If you continue like this, you will end up not having a job”, highlighting the social conflict between capital and work worthy of a communism that no longer exists.

Ultimately it was fun, maybe stand for hourse could be avoided, even not very recommendable people wandering around tables.

In the end, if you are one of the guy interested in research and AI in general, I created THIS REPO for you to run an instance of YOLOv8 on your PC!

Hope to see you at the next SHARPER Night 2024… maybe with a robot dog on a leash!