A group of motivated doctoral students. Ten short minutes to explain their research to the voting public. Prizes at the end for the audience favourites. That is a Science Slam.
Marinos Kalpakos, doctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg Doctoral School of Law, took up the challenge and brought his research into liability implications of financial large language models to a sold-out crowd at Cercle Cite in Luxembourg City on 4 October 2024.
For Marinos, participating in this event contributes to the legal academic community’s mission of outreach. “I believe in the potential of communicating science to the public in making the world a better place, especially when it comes to something as applied and impactful on daily life as law,” Marinos explains. He cites quickly-moving technological advances in fields like artificial intelligence as examples of where science communicators can make a positive impact, “We can show how individuals and business alike can safeguard their interests in the emerging novel legal landscape on technology such as AI.”
It was now up to Marinos to imagine how he would package and deliver his trove of legal research in an understandable, engaging and entertaining way. His strategy was to present a case study in which the home loan eligibility of an applicant was determined by an AI. By using a concrete example to which many people can relate, Marinos took a very theoretical concept and made it accessible to the general public. All in a day’s work for a Science Slammer.
“I always enjoyed interdisciplinary collaborations and the Science Slam was not an exception,” Manos reflects. “I learned a lot from watching the great performances of my fellow slammers from different fields. I was also inspired by the potential that such events have in bringing both scholars from other disciplines and the general public together.”
Luxembourg’s Science Slam is organised by LuxDoc, the Luxembourg Young Researchers Association and supported by FNR Luxembourg through a DESCOM grant. Find out more at scienceslam.uni.lu.