The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is participating in the exhibition "Código y algoritmos. Sentido en un mundo calculado", which opens this Tuesday at the Espacio Fundación Telefónica, in Madrid. In an increasingly parameterised world, where algorithms make decisions in countless aspects of our lives, such as work, leisure or health, the exhibition seeks to make this phenomenon and its implications understandable, generating questions and knowledge that invite reflection and debate.

Through interactive installations by 13 national and international artists, the exhibition, curated by Manuela Naveau, traces a journey through different areas in which algorithms impact our society: the importance of their neutrality and efficiency, the risks of algorithmic bias, tools to protect data privacy, the link between humans and artificial intelligence, and their contribution to finding solutions that would otherwise take years to solve or decipher.

One of the significant contributions of algorithms and artificial intelligence is generating knowledge by finding solutions that would otherwise take years to solve or decipher. A simulation is a powerful tool that allows us to better understand the world around us, from knowing the effects of medicine without administering it to anticipating climate change. This is already possible thanks to supercomputing, which can numerically simulate complex realities to study them.

In this regard, an audiovisual piece produced by the BSC in collaboration with Fundación Telefónica illustrates how processing vast amounts of data accelerate scientific research. With a capacity to perform 13 thousand trillion operations per second, the MareNostrum 4 supercomputer is the axis around which the research corpus of more than 600 scientists revolves, whose objective is to facilitate progress in various fields, with particular emphasis on Computer, Life, Earth and Engineering Sciences.

Under the artistic direction of Cynthia González, the piece presents different BSC research projects on:

• Air Quality: with the participation of Sara Basart, Marta Terrado, and Oriol Jorba, members of the Atmospheric Composition and Computational Earth Sciences team at BSC-CNS. The visualisations have been extracted from the MONARCH air quality model.
• Automatic translation of sign language: with the participation of Laia Tarrés, Amanda Duarte, Gerard I. Gállego, Xavier Giró-i-Nieto, and Jordi Torres.
• Digital twins, proteins, personalised medicine and the human genome: with visualisations taken from the video 'The Human Digital Twin', produced by the BSC.

The exhibition, which opens to the public on Wednesday, 19 October 2022, can be visited free of charge until 16 April 2023.