Cultural AI Lab

Cultural AI Lab bridges the gap between cultural heritage institutes, the humanities, and informatics. It is a collaboration between Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the KNAW Humanities Cluster (KNAW HuC), the National Library of the Netherlands (KB), the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, TNO, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and University of Amsterdam.

Artificial Intelligence plays a crucial role in analysing digitised cultural collections and making them accessible. Cultural AI Lab wants to harness the potential of AI for cultural research, and make the technology aware of cultural context. Core research themes revolve around public values such as diversity and inclusivity. The lab investigates how technology can deal with biases in data, account for multiple perspectives and subjective interpretations and bridge cultural differences.

Cultural AI Lab’s mission is the study, design and development of socio-technological AI systems that are implicitly or explicitly aware of the subtle and subjective complexity of human culture. The lab is as much about using AI for understanding human culture as it is about using knowledge and expertise from the humanities to analyse and improve AI technology. It studies how to deal with input and output data in the context of the intended (or other) application areas, how to deal with cultural bias in data and technology and how to build AI technology that is optimised for cultural and ethical values.

More info on Cultural AI Lab

A selection of research topics

Culturally aware AI

AI-assisted automated analysis to enhance the descriptions of objects in museum collections.

Social bias observatory

Creating a knowledge graph on top of existing collection databases that makes prejudices and imbalances in the data explicit such that they can be addressed.

Better informing citizens about current debates.

Developing digital tools to improve the quality of online debates

Scientific Directors

Marieke van Erp

Laura Hollink

Victor de Boer

Marieke van Erp is team leader digital humanities lab at KNAW Humanities Cluster.
Laura Hollink is leading the Human-Centered Data Analytics research group at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica.
Victor de Boer is assistant professor (UD) at the User-Centric Data Science group at the Computer Science department of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU).

Partners

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) is the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands.
The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision is the institute for media culture and a leading knowledge institute in the field of media culture and AV archiving.
KB is the national library of the Netherlands. The KB promotes the visibility, usability and longevity of the Dutch Library Collection.
KNAW Humanities Cluster is an alliance between Meertens Institute, Huygens ING, and the International Institute for Social History.
Rijksmuseum is the national museum of the Netherlands.
TNO is an independent research organisation.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is a broad research and education university in Amsterdam.
University of Amsterdam is the Netherlands’ largest university, offering the widest range of academic programmes.