Five researchers from the Faculty of Arts involved in the HAICu consortium

Five researchers from the Faculty of Arts are involved in the interdisciplinary project 'HAICu: digital Humanities - Artificial Intelligence - Cultural heritage'. The project was awarded a NWA-ORC grant of 10.3 million euros. NWO-ORC is the program 'Research on Routes by Consortia' from the Dutch Research Agenda (Nationale Wetenschapsagenda, NWA ) of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

The HAICu consortium consists of seven subprojects, with dozens of partners, including various other universities, colleges, and societal organizations collaborating.The project is led by Prof. Lambert Schomaker, a researcher at the Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science, and Artificial Intelligence of the Faculty of Science and Engineering.

About the HAICu Project

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.

Support for Cohesive News Stories

The project consists of 7 work packages. Prof. Marcel Broersma and Prof. Yael de Haan are involved in the work package that develops deep learning techniques to support journalists in using diverse multimodal heritage collections. This enables connecting news stories on similar topics from various archives, allowing journalists to create cohesive news stories that evolve over time. The goal is to assist journalists in understanding and contextualizing complex societal issues.

Advanced AI Methods Operating on Limited Data

Prof. Malvina Nissim, Dr. Tommaso Caselli, and Dr. Andreas van Cranenburgh are involved in the work package aimed at developing advanced AI methods that can operate with limited amounts of data. These methods are developed using various approaches, including transfer learning, structured methods such as Graph Convolutional Networks, and unsupervised, self-learning, and semi-supervised methods. The new learning methods help users combine their own knowledge with new insights obtained through AI.

NWA-ORC

Since 2018, the NWO has been implementing the research program of the National Science Agenda on behalf of the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science (OCW). The aim is to make a positive and structural contribution to society in the future with knowledge.