“Which faces are real – and which ones were generated by artificial intelligence?” This question greeted visitors at the IRIS booth at Cyber Valley Day 2026 in Tübingen.
On September 9, the Cyber Valley community came together to celebrate its 10th anniversary and explore current developments in artificial intelligence and robotics. IRIS was part of the event, making several contributions that showcased different perspectives on intelligent systems and their interaction with people.
One of the main attractions at the IRIS booth was a poster featuring a series of realistic-looking faces. Visitors were challenged to distinguish between real people and AI-generated faces. The simple experiment offered an accessible way to experience how convincing synthetic content has become and opened up discussions about trust, perception, and the challenges of navigating an increasingly AI-generated information environment.
The booth also featured a locally running chatbot developed by an IRIS-supervised student. Unlike many current AI applications that rely on external cloud infrastructure and powerful GPUs, the chatbot can run directly on a standard computer using a CPU. While this comes with some limitations in speed and performance, it offers important advantages: users can keep their interactions local and private while also reducing the costs and infrastructure required to run AI systems. The chatbot is used to support language learning and explore topics such as philosophy.
The possibilities of local AI were demonstrated in a second step through a robotic arm. Using voice commands processed by the locally running chatbot, visitors could see how a conversational AI system can be connected to and interact with a physical system.
These demonstrations complemented IRIS's broader presence at the event, including its contribution to AI in aviation (see LINK for details). Together, the different exhibits illustrated the interdisciplinary perspective of IRIS: from the societal implications of AI-generated content and questions of trust and privacy to human-AI interaction and the use of intelligent systems in real-world environments.
For IRIS, Cyber Valley Day was an opportunity to make these questions tangible and to engage directly with visitors. The discussions around the exhibits showed how quickly practical demonstrations can lead to broader conversations about how intelligent systems should be designed, used, and understood.
We would like to thank the Cyber Valley team for organizing Cyber Valley Day 2026 and for providing a platform that brings together researchers, innovators, and the wider community to exchange ideas about the future of AI and robotics.