NNB 54: Robots – Volcanoes – Tango

We’re back to nerd school this month with a bumper knowledge harvest where we’ll learn about robots, volcanoes and tango dance.

Plus the geek fest that is our nerd quiz and nerd news. AND with free cake.

Tickets on sale from Rialto theatre.

Doors open 7.30pm for 8pm start.

Our speakers this month:

Bianca Fogah: Volcanoes – The devil you know vs the devil you don’t

Do you really know what a volcano is? How do they work? What kinds of damage they cause and how we mitigate and manage them? The world of volcanos is vast, destructive and quite often devastating, from pyroclastic flows to magma chambers and eruptions that take out entire towns how to do we keep ourselves safe? In this talk, I will review what volcanoes are, what the differences are and how this can be the difference between life and death.

Bianca Fogah is a Physical Geography and Geology graduate from Brighton University. Since the age of 11, she has been fascinated with all things volcanology, seismology and generally destructive. Bianca currently works in administration but in her spare time with many passions for all forms of science, she wanted to share her geeky insights with you into the world of volcanoes.

Margarita Steinberg: Argentine Tango – Dancing our tangled lives

Argentine Tango, the passionate and subtle dance from Buenos Aires, has intrigued the world for generations. This talk will reveal the lesser-known aspects of the dance, and introduce a groundbreaking innovative application of its insights, including a live demo, if circumstances permit. Margarita first caught the Tango bug in 2000, started teaching Argentine Tango in early 2010’s, and talking about it publicly in 2013, with a TEDx talk on how tango seeps into the lives of those who dance it. She recently showcased an innovative learning format using tango improvisation at a conference at the University of Sussex.

Prof Thomas Nowotny: Autonomous Drones and the “Brains on Board” project

In this talk, Thomas will give an overview of some exciting recent work on the control of drones (quad copters), their autonomy and research in the “Brains on Board” project, in which he and his collaborators try to emulate the brains of bees and flies in order to build more robust autonomous robots.

Thomas Nowotny received his PhD in theoretical physics in 2001 from the University of Leipzig and worked for five years at the University of California, San Diego. In 2007 he joined the University of Sussex, where he is now a Professor of Informatics and the Director for Research and Knowledge Exchange at the School of Engineering and Informatics. His research interests include olfaction in animals and machines, GPU accelerated scientific computing, hybrid brain-computer systems, and bio-inspired machine learning and robotic control.

Hosted by Dr Mick Taylor

£4 Regular Nerds
£3 Unemployed/NUS/65+ Nerds

We regularly sell out- so if you buy a ticket you can’t use, please let us know on the Facebook page so we can ensure disorganised nerds who forgot to buy a ticket in time can still come.

Twitter: @brightonnerd
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