HACID at the Maker Faire Rome 2024

The HACID project will be present at the Maker Faire Rome with an interactive game to understand how artificial intelligence (AI) can provide essential support in complex decision problems. HACID proposes a decision support system based on crowdsourcing and AI, applied to medical diagnostics and to climate change adaptation management: domain experts and AI systems collaborate to arrive at the best solutions for each case under examination. The participation to the Maker Faire Rome is a great opportunity to connect with innovators, makers, and enthusiasts from across Europe.

Maker Faire Rome is an annual event focused on innovation, technology, and creativity. It showcases projects and inventions while offering workshops, conferences, and labs for skill development and collaboration. The event attracts students, startups, companies, and government entities, promoting idea exchange and technological growth. It has become a key hub for European innovators, positioning Italy as a center of innovation and creativity.

At the Maker Faire Rome, participants will engage with a chatbot to solve fun numerical estimation problems: they will be asked to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar, and to estimate the maximum length of a line of LEGO bricks, using all the bricks contained in a box.

After providing an individual guess, participants will engage with a chatbot, asking any question they like in order to improve their estimate. The chatbot is not aware about anything related to the game, so the question must be specific to enable a fruitful interaction. On the basis of the received advice, participants may provide a second guess, hopefully improving their estimate. Under what condition participants will perform best? Will the wisdom of the crowd survive or even improve after the intervention of the AI chatbot? We will discover the answers after the event, when we will analyse the received data to understand under which conditions the crowd performed better.

What participants will discover is that AI may not be always useful if not well prompted, and that it can give good advice but also deceptive answers, sometimes. In this way, participants will approach the themes of the project and discover how AI systems and human experts can best collaborate and complement each other.