10 million euros from NWA for HAICu consortium

The HAICu consortium, led by our Prof. Lambert Schomaker, has been awarded an NWA-ORC grant of EUR 10.3 million. The Dutch Research Council (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, NWO) announced this. NWA-ORC is the program ‘Research on Routes by Consortia’ of the Dutch Research Agenda (Nationale Wetenschapsagenda, NWA). The consortium receives the grant for the interdisciplinary project 'HAICu: digital Humanities - Artificial Intelligence - Cultural heritage'. As of 2018, NWO has been carrying out the research program of the Dutch Research Agenda on behalf of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. The main goal is to answer questions from society.

The consortium consists of dozens of partners in total, including several other universities, universities of applied sciences, and societal organizations. Lambert Schomaker is researcher at the Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of the Faculty of Science and Engineering.

HAICu: digital Humanities - Artificial Intelligence - Cultural heritage

In the HAICu project, AI researchers, Digital Humanities researchers, heritage professionals and engaged citizens work together on scientific breakthroughs to open, link and analyze large-scale multimodal digital heritage collections in context. The exceptional challenges of cultural heritage present a unique opportunity to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence. Future techniques must be able to be used outside the laboratory, learn from as few examples as possible and continuously learn from users. This fundamentally takes into account current societal demands for responsible, explainable methods for constructing multimodal narratives about our cultural heritage which reach beyond current large language models.

NWA ORC

The Dutch Research Council carries out the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA) research program on behalf of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. The aim is to use knowledge to make a positive and structural contribution to tomorrow's society. In the NWA-ORC, interdisciplinary consortia are working on the 25 NWA routes.

Other NWA projects

• Prof. Moniek Tromp, Faculty of Science and Engineering, is involved in the Battery NL programme