Students on the Media Informatics degree programme took part in this year’s Science Festival in Bonn alongside Professor Frank Zimmer to present their latest projects.
The 19th edition of the festival was held under the theme ‘SHOW YOURSELF! Making the invisible visible’. From 16 to 21 September, around 60,000 visitors flocked to Bonn’s Münsterplatz and many other locations in the city centre to take part in hands-on activities, live experiments, talks, workshops and other interesting science events. One particular crowd-puller was undoubtedly the grand highlights show, hosted by TV presenter Ranga Yogeshwar.
Accepting an invitation from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Professor Zimmer and his students took the opportunity to present the results of joint projects in the fields of visualisation and machine learning to a wide audience, alongside scientists from the MPIfR.
Sarah-Maria Rostalski, for example, demonstrated a method for detecting artificial radio signals in pulsar data. Pulsars are compact, rapidly rotating remnants of exploded stars (‘cosmic lighthouses’). With the help of machine learning and an automated approach, terrestrial interference (e.g. from mobile phones) could be identified during pulsar observations and the signals cleaned up. David Bolczyk’s animation explaining how a radio telescope works was also received with great enthusiasm. “We were delighted to receive the invitation from the MPIfR. The event, and in particular the exchange with other scientists, was extraordinarily motivating and inspiring for us. We also came away with a wealth of new project ideas,” emphasises Professor Zimmer.
The Science Festival is organised by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the German Physical Society (DPG) and the University of Bonn. In September 2020, the ‘20th Highlights of Physics’ event in Würzburg will focus on the 175th anniversary of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s birth.
