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, Wereldmuseum, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and University of Amsterdam.

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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.

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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.