Make a wish: at the Osaka Expo, CodeLounge makes it (almost) come true

How can we design the future society for our lives? This is the central question behind the Osaka Expo. CodeLounge, part of the Software Institute (SI) at the USI Faculty of Informatics, has fully embraced this challenge, collaborating on the creation of one of the installations in the Swiss pavilion. Marco D'Ambros, Director of CodeLounge, and Andrea Mocci, Junior Group Leader of CodeLounge, shared their insights on this topic with Laser (Rete Due).

"The idea was proposed to us by Roberto Minelli, who is the Academic Coordinator at the Software Institute," explained Marco D'Ambros. "We then spoke to Swissnex and subsequently developed a project proposal. When we became involved, the concept of bubbles had already been developed. Our task was to handle the technical aspect of converting speech—specifically, the voices of participants—into a visual format. The system we created begins with the audio source, which can be in either English or Japanese. First, it transcribes the audio into text, then it processes this text to aggregate data from various conversations and generate thematic bubbles."

The local infrastructure in Osaka communicates daily with USI, as explained by Andrea Mocci: "The Osaka infrastructure periodically sends us recordings made on-site, which we transcribe and process daily. The quality of the recordings varies significantly; some may be too short, so we first select the most interesting ones that we can use to reconstruct the common visions people have for their future. Since the opening of the Expo, we have collected approximately 70,000 visions from individuals. An operator in Osaka curates the most compelling visions to be displayed through an animation we have developed." The Swiss pavilion's managers monitor the wishes expressed daily; this observation allows us to identify concretely what people's hopes are for the future of society.

As emphasised by the Director of CodeLounge, what is shown at the Swiss pavilion is an example of the application of Artificial Intelligence: the system is capable of receiving messages in various languages, converting spoken language into written form, and recognising similar concepts even when they are expressed using different words. As illustrated by Marco D'Ambros, the technology installed in Osaka actually has numerous other applications: "There is natural language, which is what we use to speak; then there is machine language, which is what computers can understand and is coded more rigidly. At our centre, we work extensively with natural language, which can be applied to multiple applications. Currently, for example, we are conducting a project that aims to analyse 150 years of Swiss commercial register history. The advantage of converting words into data is that it allows us to compare today's texts with those from 150 years ago, when people wrote differently. This enables us to carry out some very interesting analyses, such as the impact of certain historical events, such as the wars of the 20th century, on the Swiss economy."

At the end of August, the Swiss pavilion was visited by a delegation composed of several members of the Council of States: Andrea Caroni (President), Stefan Engler (First Vice-President), Werner Salzmann (Second Vice-President), Mathilde Crevoisier (member), Petra Gössi (member) and Annette Feitscher (Vice-Secretary). Also present were Roger Dubach (Swiss Ambassador to Japan), Manuel Salchli (Commissioner General of the Swiss pavilion), David Braun (Deputy Head of Mission at the Swiss Embassy in Japan), Andrea Anastasi (Head of the Foreign Affairs Division of the Swiss Embassy in Japan) and Felix Moesner (CEO of Swissnex in Japan).

The episode of Laser (Rete Due) with interviews with Marco D'Ambros and Andrea Mocci is available at the following link.