Artificial intelligence to bring museum specimens to the masses

Scientists are using cutting-edge artificial intelligence to help extract complex information from large collections of museum specimens. A team from Cardiff University is using state-of-the-art techniques to automatically segment and capture information from museum specimens and perform important data quality improvement without the need of human input. They have been working with museums from across Europe, including the Natural History Museum, London, to refine and validate their new methods and contribute to the mammoth task of digitizing hundreds of millions of specimens. With more than 3 billion biological and geological specimens curated in natural history museums around the world, the digitization of museum specimens, in which physical information from a particular specimen is transformed into a digital format, has become an increasingly important task for museums as they adapt to an increasingly digital world. A treasure trove of digital information is invaluable for scientists trying to model the past, present and future of organisms and our planet, and could be key to tackling some of the biggest societal challenges our world faces today, from conserving biodiversity and tackling climate change to finding new ways to cope with emerging diseases like COVID-19.