Leveraging the Power of AI for European Cultural Heritage

BARCELONA, Spain, July 28, 2020 -- AI will now be well-versed in cultural heritage due to a new EU-funded project called Saint George on a Bike. Composed of researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Europeana Foundation, the project has begun training natural language processing and deep learning algorithms in culture, symbols, and historical context with the aim of automatically generating rich metadata for hundreds of thousands of images from various European cultural heritage repositories. Training AI to be aware of cultural heritage contexts is not as simple as teaching it to identify different objects in a picture. Saint George on a Bike is fine-tuning the algorithms so that it "thinks" in context and according to time parameters. "The AI we are developing will be able to tell whether a painting shows Saint George on a horse or a bike," said Maria Cristina Marinescu, senior researcher at BSC and coordinator of the Saint George on a Bike project. "This is not as easy as it sounds because the shapes are similar.