ICT-project a mediahit

Fontys Information and Communication Technology

ICT project that tackled ‘The Mole’ with AI is a media hit

It doesn't often happen that Fontys is featured on almost every radio station. But ICT coach Frans Mouws and his students succeeded once again. As in January, the media pounced on the Fontys team because of their AI prediction on the outcome of ‘Who is the Mole?’.

Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 5, Radio 10, Omroep Brabant, Hart van Nederland, Editie NL, Shownieuws, NOS Stories; and then we might miss a few. Mouws and the students from Fontys ICT's incubator programme had their hands full giving interviews since Wednesday.

‘That's not surprising either,’ Mouws explains. ‘After the second broadcast of Who is the Mole, we identified three of the 20 candidates as potential Mole. Two of the three, Anne and Fons, were in the final on Saturday. The only one of our trio who was not among them, by the way, had not been added by AI but nota bene by myself manually.’

It eventually turned out to be Anna. Bull's-eye, in other words. However, Mouws doesn't even want to give too much value to the result. ‘We stopped the project before the Carnival holidays because a new semester was coming up. And we also only put 10 out of 20 make-up participants through AI. So maybe with a new batch of students we'll take up Who is the Mole? again in a future season, and then have everything analysed.’
Mouws said it in an interview with Bron in January: AI is not holy. Nor smarter. Just much faster. ‘Whether we would get this right or not: it's about the challenge. Can you do anything with those AI tools? Well, the students have shown that so can you.’

Although AI also can't do a lot of things. ‘Ask AI to draw a horse and a hundred beautiful horses come out. Ask it to draw a smurf on a horse and it has no idea what you are talking about. AI cannot do more than we tell it to do. AI is especially good at reproducing things that are already known, but very quickly, making it look almost like magic. But as with this assignment of Who is the Mole? next year, we could start doing something with voice, words and facial expressions. And let's see if we can then predict Who the Mole is even faster.’

The students and their coach were somewhat caught off guard by the amount of attention they suddenly received from regional and national media. And not only that. The team was also approached by other colleges and gave guest lectures at AI companies. ‘Yes, there was a lot of spinoff,’ chuckles a satisfied Mouws. ‘That's good for our name: for our incubator programme, for ICT and for Fontys.’

Tags: In the Media