Chaos Computer Club - recent events feed (low quality)

Consider the category of groups with its forgetful functor down to Set. This functor is monadic, which tells us that groups are sets equipped with an algebraic structure. Now consider the category of finite sets, with its inclusion into Set. This functor is not monadic for many reasons, but what monadic functor best approximates it? In other words, finite sets are most like sets equipped with what...

String diagrams are often traced back to Richard Penrose's work in mathematical physics, but they also have an early and largely overlooked history in computer science through Günter Hotz. Following in the footsteps of Hotz, this talk will provide an introduction to string diagrams through the lens of circuit design. Rather than beginning with category theory, we start from circuits and their comp...

Formalisation is the process of expressing mathematical ideas in the language understood by a proof assistant, a computer program that enables the interactive construction of verified mathematical definitions, theorems, and proofs. The stereotypical understanding of formalisation is as the rote translation of pre-existing mathematics to a cumbersome formal language, done primarily as a means of ce...

Opening of QTCat! Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://pretalx.c3voc.de/qtcat-2026/talk/G8V7E7/

PowerPoint karaoke takes a new turn! After exploring chicken chicken chicken, auctioning cobalt-60 rods, and accidentally predicting the rise of AI we take a journey into the weirder side of the archives... We have been born too early to explore the stars, yet born too late to be prescribed exciting chemicals and adult toys by Victorian physicians for depression. Fortunately we exist at just the r...

Feast your eyes on generative art, executable animations, music, art, and more. Come and see what the people of EMF and the demoscene have released at this year's Field-FX, as we round-up last night's demoparty and give cheers for the entries that the audience voted the best! Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ about this event: https://www.emfcamp.org/sche...

The ceremony in which we close the festival. Goodbye! Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ about this event: https://www.emfcamp.org/schedule/2026/279-closing-ceremony

It turns out that you can't just say anything on the internet. Things that would be illegal to put in print are also illegal to publish online. We'll be going on a short journey through a real world case of this, from the process of starting a claim to turning up in the high court and what happens next. It'll be a cautionary story covering a range of things you should absolutely not do and what ha...

What do your phone, the night sky, and the Big Bang have in common? They all involve light, in one form or another. In this talk, we will follow light across the Universe and back in time, towards the Big Bang. We begin with EMF in everyday life - the electromagnetic waves around us - then move out to the light we receive from stars and galaxies, and finally reach the Cosmic Microwave Background -...

What connects quiz-show winners, on-line poker cheaters and cyber attacks on Taiwanese national ID cards? In this talk I’ll present a historical overview of randomness failures. Why are random number generators so often at the root of cyber-security problems and why are they so damn difficult to implement in hardware? I will go over several incidents of security failures caused by bad randomness i...

Flexible circuit boards (flexible PCBs) are pretty cool: they are lightweight, can fold into small spaces, are bendable, and can be designed to stretch. You might have seen one inside a digital camera, a wearable, or connecting a screen to another board in a laptop or smartphone. Or you might have had one made for an electronics project. But have you ever made one yourself? Unlike conventional, ri...

Voice assistants are getting easier to deploy, but they’re still generic. This talk follows my attempt to build a mostly-local Home Assistant voice system that not only controls the house, but has a personality. We’ll explore the trade-offs between local and cloud services, improving recognition for regional accents, creating custom Piper voices, and adding character to an assistant that would oth...

Robin Ince is a multi award winning comedian, author, broadcaster, bibliomaniac and a populariser of scientific ideas. He is perhaps best known as the former co-host and co-creator of the Sony Gold Award winning BBC Radio 4 series The Infinite Monkey Cage with Professor Brian Cox. As a stand up Robin has toured the world and as an author he has written four acclaimed books, including Bibliomaniac,...

An open source lock-picking robot, which counterintuitively is designed to make locks more secure. Made as an alternative to master keys, which are used widely (for example, on almost every suitcase) and have large inherent security issues. The lockpicking robot uses a series of wires which push through a custom 3D-printed steel key blank to spoof the correct key bitting. github.com/etinaude/unloc...

In my quest for Weird Art, long have I wanted to build a digital slit-scan camera. The idea was to take a linear CCD, a load of RAM, and glue them together with an FPGA. But as I pursued the project, things went in a strange new direction, and I ended up creating something different, something so fascinatingly odd that it changed the way I think about time and space. It all got quite philosophical...

Members of the EMF infrastructure teams will talk about how we made the event happen this year, with all the important statistics. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ about this event: https://www.emfcamp.org/schedule/2026/124-infrastructure-review

What could other worlds look like? Exoplanetology — the study of planets orbiting stars other than our sun — is rapidly progressing, and researchers are discovering increasing numbers of planets. Little is known about these distant worlds — perhaps their mass, or their radius, but conditions on the surface are still left somewhat to our imagination. The nearest star to the Earth after the Sun is P...

Levitation is a popular trope of magical media, but are we actually able to defy gravity and suspend things in the air? The short answer is yes. And the longer answer is we have lots of different ways. Using magnets, sound, light, and more we’ve levitated objects from single cells to entire passenger trains. We’ll go over the basic principles underpinning each approach, and consider their benefits...

A deep dive into the process of designing and implementing a fully custom-built wearable video screen, which was used on a 50-date international arena concert tour by a well-known musical artist in 2025 and 2026. Details of all aspects will be explored, from initial concept design with the artist's creative and tour production teams, technical electronic and mechanical aspects, integration of the...

For over 100 years now, being able to take an image of brain activity has been a really useful approach to understanding how brains work. But, more recently, we’ve learnt how to change brain states. Non-invasive Brain Stimulation (NiBS) does just that; temporarily interfere with normal brain activation without having to anaesthetise, cut, drill or otherwise violate the skull! The plan for this tal...

Machine knitting has grown in use and popularity over the past decade as domestic knitting machines have been rescued from dusty attics. Computerised knitting machines are now within reach for significantly less money than their older, more established industrial ancestors. But what makes an industrial knitting machine different from one you could have at home? What does it mean for it to be compu...

Is it still your car? With a modern car running between 100 and 150 small computers - ECUs - the question is hard to answer. In 2015 some hackers took control together with a baffled Wired reporter of the car he was driving, from miles away. This led to a lot more interest in those computers constantly talking to each other over CAN bus. There is a massive playground here and most people do not ev...

Come and watch me point a spectrometer at a load of things, and teach you about how light interacts with stuff. What’s a spectrometer, you ask? Well it’s a device that measures light and produces a graph of the brightness of the light at each wavelength. I inherited one last year, and this talk will mainly consist of live demos of the spectrometer, along with explanations of what we’re seeing and...

What does designing software have in common with keeping people alive? More than you might think, probably. Decomposing software problems might take different knowledge than turning syndromes into diagnoses, but if you’ve got the skills to do one, you’re well on your way to the other. Join a computer scientist turned ambulance crew, awaiting results on their Masters in Paramedic Science, to learn...

With the NHS promising to "review" care for transgender adults, community science and manufacturing capabilities are stepping up where healthcare has failed for decades. Come be part of that community, make your own HRT. It's cheap, safe, and lifesaving medical care when there's no-one left to turn to but ourselves! Learn: Why biohacking is cool, and still a human right no matter what governments...