Public Engagement

In July 2025, our students Núria Fàbrega Ribas, Artur Miralles and Zhijie Yao ran an interactive workshop for 15 students in their penultimate year of secondary school who are considering a Computer Science degree.

As part of the Computer Science & Engineering stream of The Sutton Trust Summer School at The University of Edinburgh, the session introduced students to the world of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

The workshop began with a presentation covering the basic of LLMs: how they work, how they're trained, and how they're used in real-world applications. Students then applied what they’d learned in a hands-on activity where they used various LLMs and NLP techniques to analyse thousands of real visitor reviews from Edinburgh Zoo.

Working through a beginner-friendly Jupyter Notebook, students explored how to automatically detect animals mentions in text, analyse positive and negative opinions about animals, and create short summaries of the reviews. Along the way, they also got their first experience with programming in Python, seeing how code can be used to work with language and extract meaning from data. To wrap up, students debated how they might improve the zoo experience based on the patterns they observed in the reviews.

The materials for the workshop are freely available at: https://github.com/nuriafari/NLP_workshop_zoo_reviews 

In March 2025, Jamie Davies and Rodrigo Lara Molina gave a talk to students from three Edinburgh secondary schools, about their research projects at AI4BI. This was part of the Widening Participation program at The University of Edinburgh, which focuses on inspiring young people to be life-long learners.

The talk focused on how AI can be used in two biomedical applications: accelerated cardiac MRI, and experimental design to tackle antibiotic resistance.

To explain these projects, they both used analogies accessible to the students:

• Jamie explored mobile phone face recognition, self-driving cars, and text-to-image generation, to introduce computer vision and explain how he is building software for image reconstruction in accelerated cardiac MRI.
• Rodrigo explained how he could frame his project as training a machine to play a specific video game, where the aim is to experiment with bacteria to understand how resistance to antibiotics develops. Thus, the machine would learn how to be a scientific-AI-assistant which can propose the most informative experiments to study antibiotic resistance. 

The students asked a lot of great questions around AI: how models are built, what are they useful for, and when and how they can go wrong. We hope some of these students will end up studying with us at the School of Informatics, although the main objective was to inspire them to learn more and pursue their interests, whatever they might be!

In April 2025, our students Melina Müller and Bianca Branco, alongside other University of Edinburgh PhD candidates Eileen Xu, Christina Steyn and Clara Sanchez-Izquierdo Lozano, ran their own workshop as part of Edinburgh Science Festival, called Spacebound Minds.

The group performed a story in which Mission Control and mental health researchers interviewed an astronaut struggling with her mental health after spending a long time at the space station. The children attending were tasked with designing their own rooms at the space station, thinking about what they need (other than food, water and oxygen) to be happy and healthy on another planet.

The workshop encouraged young people to learn and reflect on mental health and well-being topics. It focused on the themes of sleep, physical exercise, and social contact, delivering (kid-friendly) scientific explanations for how and why these activities impact our mental health.