Team MIDAS at the Luxembourg national day of statistics

Team MIDAS was well represented at the "Journée de la statistique 2022" with the participation of Christophe Ley.

The event was held on October 22^nd and organized by STATEC (the Luxembourg's national institute of statistics). The topic of this fifth edition was "From the infinitely small to the infinitely large: artificial intelligence at the frontier of the visible". The talks targeted a large audience from any age and any educational background.

Journée de la statistique 2022

STATEC's missions, as the national institute of statistics, are "to provide the public and private decision-makers as well as the citizens with high quality statistical information". To that end, the institute also organizes the event "Journée de la statistique", in collaboration with the Luxembourg's Science Center to target a wide audience and educate on important concepts of statistics that can affect every citizen in their day-to-day life. Such events can also help fight the "mathematical illiteracy", a term proposed by Prof. Ley during his keynote speech.

In this 2022 edition, the focus was put on artificial intelligence, with an introduction on concepts of machine learning and big data, and how they impact all domains.
During the day, three talks were given on how artificial intelligence assists the newest generations of telescopes to get high definition pictures from the skies, or how it helps recreate natural phenomona such as in a mist simulator.

You can find more information about this event on the Science Center's website or on STATEC's website.

A guided tour on artificial intelligence

Prof. Ley gave a keynote speech aiming to be a "pleasant guided tour" towards the field of artificial intelligence. The goal was to give a quick overview of what the term "artificial intelligence" means and in which fields can machine learning be used.
The scope of the talk was pedagogical, to highlight the benefits of these new technologies as well as their risks to suggest why we need to protect us. Prof. Ley highlighted the need of mathematical education, even at a basic level, so "everyone can have a sense of numbers" and understand scales and amplitudes when it comes to amount of data. To define this lack of education, he used the term "mathematical illiteracy" which we need to fight.

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