Every year the Institute of Space Science is one of the partners of MSciTeh Summer School from Magurele, making August a particularly busy month for our group as we are involved in mentoring activities of  high school students. Scholars from all over the country become scientists for two weeks during which they have to conduct an actual scientific analysis under the guidance of researchers.

‍ The  research theme we proposed for this year was focused around solving a cocktail party problem with neural networks. By the end of the school. The students learnt how to develop their own neural network from scratch, how to search for solutions like a real researcher and how to present their results in a scientific manner!

During the summer school, our group members were invited to discuss more on the subject in two different  interviews which you can also check out here.

On the 20th and 21st of April, two members of our team participated in an outreach project which promotes different ways of bringing science closer to the public, regarding their age and previous knowledge. After a long training day on how to make complex scientific concepts accessible to anyone and how to use all emotions to one’s benefit, our colleagues entered a tight competition between young researchers presenting their studies.  The competition format was somewhat similar to the one “Three minute thesis” contest has, but it consisted in four different eliminatory rounds of 15seconds, 30 seconds, 90 seconds and respectively 3 minutes. After long deliberations, the jury acknowledged our team mates’ merits and awarded Alice Paun with a special prize for the way she disseminated information about her research in the Strange Quark Matter Particles domain, and allocated the first place to Florentina Pislan, who narrated about her research in the Gravitational Waves field.