The Cultural AI Lab partners have renewed their commitment to the lab by signing an updated consortium agreement. In this agreement, the partners (VU, UvA, Rijksmuseum, CWI, Wereldmuseum, KNAW, Sound and Vision and the National Library) have agreed to continue and strengthen their collaboration on the topic of AI for Culture and Culture for AI. Through this agreement, the knowledge partners and the heritage institutes commit to sharing information, research and use cases around these topics.

The Cultural AI Lab partners will organize several internal and public events to discuss these issues with research communities and communities of practice.

We look forward to bringing this collaboration into practice over the coming years!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/186PDSKNR4wwxh2bCwgtfb

https://podcastluisteren.nl/ep/Snoek-op-Zolder-13-met-Laura-Hollink-van-het-CWI-en-het-Culture-AI-Lab

On Friday, 7 May 2021, EuropeanaTech hosted the second webinar in the series ‘EuropeanaTech x AI’. In this session we took the chance to dive deeper into ethical and political themes and therefore the session carried the stimulating title: 'Cultural AI Lab: Responsible AI and the Politics of Metadata'. In order to explore this theme with us, the Cultural AI Lab, the Lab's partners and ancillary research groups joined the program. The Cultural AI Lab's network of researchers and heritage professionals showcased their current work and shared their challenges.

Among these speakers were: Laura Hollink (a head of Cultural AI), Cindy Zalm & Valentin Vogelmann (SABIO: The SociAl BIas Observatory), Mari Wigham (‘Data stories’: Who's speaking? Politicians and parties in the media during the Dutch election campaign 2021), Nikolay Banar (INSIGHT: Neural Systems as InteGrated Heritage Tools) and Vendela Grundell Gachoud (Metadata as a Diversity Tool).

Europeana has recorded and recently published the webinar series. Find the ‘EuropeanaTech x AI: Cultural AI’ webinar here, or re-watch the other webinars: Saint George on a Bike Project, the Qurator Project and the ‘EuropeanaTech x AI: eScriptorium’ webinar.

On Friday 7 May, Cultural AI will participate in the ‘EuropeanaTech x AI’ webinar series. The session is titled: “Cultural AI Lab: Responsible AI and the Politics of Metadata” The vision of Cultural AI is to accelerate excellent research on the intersection of humanities and artificial intelligence. Core lab themes revolve around public values, like diversity and inclusivity, investigating how technology can deal with biases in data, account for multiple perspectives and subjective interpretations, and bridge cultural differences.

At this webinar, the Lab's partners and ancillary research groups will give us an introduction to the project and present examples for the running projects in and related to the Cultural AI Lab. We look forward to hearing from Vendela Grundell Gachoud (Stockholm University), Laura Hollink (Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica and Cultural AI Lab Director), Marieke van Erp (DHLab and Cultural AI Lab Director), Valentin Vogelmann (KNAW Humanities Cluster), Mari Wigham (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision), and Cindy Zalm (National Museum of World Cultures, NL) and Johan Oomen. Register now.

We are very happy to have been selected for the first Challenge for Europeana AI/ML Datasets by EuropeanaTech, along with two other projects.

We proposed to build ConConCor, a corpus of contentious terms in context based on a selected subset of the Dutch newspaper collection within Europeana. With the provided funding, we will crowd-source annotations of terms, their level of contentiousness and preferred alternatives. Once ConConCor is established, we will conduct a pilot study into how it can be used to bootstrap and evaluate bias-aware AI.

The project will be completed by the end of June, we're excited to get to work!

Join us for our first Cultural AI Webinar! What you can expect:

• Welcome by host Eveline van Rijswijk

• Introduction Cultural AI Lab: Marieke van Erp (KNAW HuC) & Laura Hollink (CWI)

• The contribution of Cultural Heritage: Saskia Scheltjens (Rijksmuseum)

• Mini pitches of the projects:

  • Culturally Aware AI – Ryan Brate (KNAW HuC) & Andrei Nesterov (CWI)

  • SABIO – Valentin Vogelmann (KNAW HuC)

  • BETTER-Mods – Cedric Waterschoot (KNAW Meertens)

  • RE-FRAME – t.b.d. (Universiteit Utrecht)

• Closing Remarks

Attendance is free, but registration is required: https://denhaag.beeldengeluid.nl/en/agenda/webinar-cultural-ai-lab/

We have uploaded the pitches and extended Q&A on our website!

Marieke van Erp will present ongoing research in the Cultural AI Lab at the Technische Universität Berlin’s Forschungskolloquium zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte. For more information, see: https://zwg.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/de/kalender/why-we-need-culturally-aware-ai

We are looking for a PhD student for the project “RE-FRAME: Iconisation and framing in the (re)use of digital sources and tools in audiovisual journalism”. The project will investigate the journalistic practice of the use of audiovisual data and digital tools in audiovisual journalistic productions. The project will be carried out at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University. The PhD student will be supervised by prof. dr. José van Dijck (UU), prof. dr. Tamara Witschge (HvA/RUG) en dr. Jasmijn Van Gorp (UU). Other members of the research team are Johan Oomen en Roeland Ordelman (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision), Ruben Brave (Make Media Great Again) and Marieke van Erp (KNAW Humanities Cluster).

More details on the project and how to apply at: https://www.uu.nl/organisatie/werken-bij-de-universiteit-utrecht/vacatures/phd-positie-in-mediastudies-digitale-tools-en-hergebruik-van-audiovisuele-data-in-de-journalistieke

Deadline: 11 November 2020

For the SociAl BIas Observatory (SABIO) project, the KNAW Humanities Cluster is looking for a motivated researcher working on the intersection of language technology, semantic web and cultural heritage. The SABIO project is funded by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network and is aimed at investigating bias in the digital collections of the members of the network.

In this project, we investigate how collection managers and curators create and add metadata to collection objects, and how bias in these metadata can be detected using statistical models. We aim to create a knowledge graph on top of existing collection databases that makes prejudices and imbalances in the data explicit such that they can be addressed, as well as taken into account by users of the data. 

The appointed candidate will be embedded in the Digital Humanities Lab at the KNAW Humanities Cluster, and will collaborate closely with the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (organisation responsible for Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, Afrikamuseum en Wereldmuseum Rotterdam) and the Information Access group at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. 

More details on the project and how to apply at: https://www.academictransfer.com/en/295060/postdoctoral-researcher-sabio-dh-lab-humanities-cluster-knaw-amsterdam/

Deadline 8 November 2020.

The AI:CULT project is looking for 2 PhD students to develop methods and techniques for applying AI to subjective and polyvocal data sets. The reasons for certain heritage data to be preserved, its interpretation throughout time, and the way heritage data is accessed after digitalisation is all subject to biases. The inherent richness, subjectivity and polyvocal nature of cultural heritage data limits and often even rules out the responsible use of AI. How do we model that “Seventeenth Century” and “The Golden Age” refer to the same era, yet are not fully synonymous and carry different semantic payloads? Current state-of-the-art AI cannot deal with subtleties in a way that does justice to the important role of the heritage institute as a trusted source of information. A crucial question is how can we reap the benefits of AI while guarding against its undesired consequences?

AI:CULT addresses two case studies: 1) automatic analysis and enrichment of object-level descriptions and 2) the creation of data stories from raw collection data. Bias detection and filtering methods will be developed that will be directly tested on the heritage partners’ workflows and made available to all memory organisations in the Netherlands.

More details on the project and how to apply at: https://www.academictransfer.com/en/294803/phd-researchers-humanities-cluster-knaw-amsterdam/

Deadline: 1 November 2020

Antal van den Bosch was interviewed by NRC on his work in AI where he also explains Cultural AI: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/10/04/vertaalprogramma-werkt-zoals-je-brein-a4014623

Marieke van Erp was interviewed by Sander Pleij for Vrij Nederland’s podcast MENS (in Dutch): https://www.vn.nl/mens-22/

Cultural AI and its steady acceptance in the heritage sector

The heritage sector is learning to embrace artificial intelligence. This certainly is encouraging, according to CWI researcher Jacco van Ossenbruggen and Martijn Kleppe, head of research at the National Library of the Netherlands. Both researchers advocate the use AI, and point out recent advances in this field. [read full article]