CITIC of the University of A Coruña will actively participate in G-Night 2024, a day dedicated to scientific outreach, organized in collaboration with the University of Vigo and the UDC Outreach Unit. The event will take place on Friday, September 27, and will feature activities designed for different audiences, both at CITIC facilities and at MUNCYT (National Museum of Science and Technology).

Activities at CITIC

A group of 2nd-year high school students from IES Rego de Trabe in Culleredo will have the opportunity to visit CITIC in an exclusive activity for educational centers.

From 11:00 to 11:30, the day will begin with a lecture by Susana Ladra González, a CITIC researcher, titled “Musical Digital Fingerprints: How Songs Are Represented and Searched on the Internet,” where the process of identifying songs using digital technology will be explained.

Next, from 11:30 to 13:30, the students will participate in a guided tour of the facilities, where they will learn about the projects being carried out in areas such as artificial intelligence, big data, and high-performance computing.

Activities at MUNCYT

MUNCYT will be another key point of G-Night, with a varied program of talks and workshops addressing current technological and scientific topics, aimed at both adults and children.

Starting at 18:00, a series of brief lectures will be offered, lasting 15 minutes plus 5 minutes for questions, with free admission. Experts from the University of A Coruña will address the following topics:

• 18:00: Automatic facial recognition, identity, and control, by Patricia Faraldo Cabana.

• 18:20: Computational problems to obtain an individual’s genome, by José Ramón Paramá Gabía.

• 18:40: Relationships between linguistics and artificial intelligence, by Margarita María Alonso Ramos.

• 19:00: A journey through positioning systems, from the sextant to GPS, by Carlos José Escudero Cascón.

Meanwhile, from 18:00 to 19:00, the “TuTIC” workshops will be held, aimed at children aged 8 to 12, with a maximum of 15 participants. In these workshops, coordinated by CITIC researchers, the children will have the opportunity to learn about electromagnetism, electrical circuits, and programming, applying these concepts in real projects. Researchers Adriana Dapena Janeiro, Paula M. Castro Castro, Oscar Fresnedo Arias, Jonatan Enes Álvarez, José Manuel Andión Fernández, and Francisco Laport López will be responsible for this activity, which aims to foster curiosity and practical learning, bringing science and technology closer to young people in an interactive and fun way.

Astronomy, technology transfer, social networks, and mental health

Another activity planned for G-Night includes three sessions on astronomy, social networks, and technology transfer conducted by CITIC researchers, which will take place on Friday, September 27. The first will be led by Xabier Pérez, who will give the session “The Meter Calculated by a Galician in the 19th Century” at 19:00 at the Afundación headquarters in Santiago de Compostela in an event organized by the Royal Galician Academy of Sciences (RAGC). In the lecture, he will explain how a scientific expedition aimed at calculating the distance between a bell tower in Dunkirk and a castle in Barcelona helped establish the basic unit of distance we know as the “meter.” A Galician was involved in this, José Rodríguez González, also known as Mathematician Rodríguez or the Mathematician of Bermés.

In parallel, at the Árnica bar in A Coruña, researcher Miguel Anxo Pérez Vila will analyze “Depressive Symptoms and Social Media Use”, discussing how social media can be used to detect symptoms of depression through advanced natural language processing and machine learning techniques. This analysis will be complemented by the participation of Paloma Piot Pérez-Abadín, a UDC researcher in hate speech detection on social networks, who will share her experience in identifying problematic language patterns and their impact on mental health. Additionally, Laura Hermo, an expert in Developmental and Educational Psychology, will offer her expert perspective on the relevance of these technologies in the emotional development of young people.

Finally, at the La Olímpica bar, CITIC researcher José A. Iglesias-Guitián will give the session “From Cinemas to Consultations: How Visual Effects Technology Can Boost Advanced Medical Visualization”, presenting an example of technology transfer that originated in the field of special effects and animation for scientific or medical visualization.

G-Night is an excellent opportunity for the general public to get closer to the world of science and technology, and for CITIC, it represents a unique occasion to showcase its research work and commitment to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Don’t miss it!