Fête de la Science

During 4 days, a team of 3 people, including Clément and me from Endomic and Nicolas from our laboratory, held a stand to explain and popularize human immunology and artificial intelligence to general public. Combining our knowledge on medical biology and computer science, we focused on showing how the human immune system works and how AI can help scientists better analyze and understand it. For that, we set up two workshops where public were invited to manipulate just like a scientist.

1. For the first workshop, people were invited to extract their own skin and mouth cells, and try to colorize them using different pigments. Some of them worked better than others, so the participants had to write a protocol and run multiple experiments to assess the efficiency of the pigments.
2. After that, using a previously extracted blood sample, participants were asked to analyze a microscopic image to count the number of red and white blood cells. Because there were hundreds of them, it was a nearly impossible task in a reasonable time. So we showed how AI could automatically identify red and white blood cells and count them, thus demonstrating the utility of AI in biological domain.

In the end it was a bit exhausting but very fun and satisfying experience for us, and we had a great time discussing our work with very interested people.