NODE+CODE Meetup #22.2 – How to build a bot from scratch

For NODE+CODE Meetup #22.2, Aurelie Herbelot is bringing us our new display mascot: an empty, and therefore still rather dumb, chatbot.

Aurelie Herbelot is a computational linguist specializing in very small natural language processing models, because she believes that future technologies should neither destroy the environment nor be controlled by a few overpowering companies, but should be accessible to everyone.

For this meetup and the soft opening of our new community space display, Aurelie is bringing us a particularly small chatbot, a little bot that we will bring to life together: we will name it and decide collectively what data we want to train it with. We will feed it the very first data, watch it train, and teach it to speak for the first time. We will look at what the little bot remembers when we feed it our language and our topics, and why that is the case.

Come by and bring the little bot to life with us!

(and, as always, hang out with us and take a nice, warm soup!)

📅 14.11.2025, 19:00, Doors open: 18:30
📍 display, Berliner Straße 60,
60311 Frankfurt am Main
🎟️ entry free!
🍲 soup included!

NODE+CODE #22.2 is taking place as part of the soft opening week of display and the nationwide ‘Netzpolitik & Demokratie’ campaign days. display is the new space for digital practice in the centre of Frankfurt and a cooperation project between us, NODE Forum for Digital Arts, and ‘Stabstelle Digitalisierung’, the Digitalisation Department of the City of Frankfurt am Main.
http://d-i-s-p-l-a-y.de/

The project is funded in the program “Promotion of Cultural and Creative Industries Institutions” by the Hessian Ministry of Economy, Energy, Transport, Housing and Rural Affairs. In collaboration with Crespo Foundation, Frankfurt Economic Development, University of Applied Sciences Mainz and MESO Digital Interiors.