On 28 November 2022, the research team of the University of Milan (UMIL) joining the VAST Project,  participated in the 1st Italian Workshop on AI for Cultural Heritage (AI4CH22) which was held in conjunction with the 21st International Conference of the Italian Association for AI (AIxIA 2022) at the University of Udine (Italy).

During the workshop, Dr. Stefano Montanelli, Dr. Alfio Ferrara, and Dr. Martin Ruskov presented the paper “Detecting the Semantic Shift of Values in Cultural Heritage Document Collections” and joined a fruitful, constructive discussion with the workshop participants.

A few words about the Workshop

The workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage (AI4CH22) aims at bringing together researchers, policymakers, professionals, and practitioners to explore the main issues concerning the application of Artificial Intelligence to cultural heritage. In particular, it aims at fostering interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research on tangible and intangible cultural heritage, promoting the use of Artificial Intelligence models, methodologies, and tools for the study, research, preservation, and dissemination of cultural heritage content. At the same time, the workshop will encourage discussion on the ethical aspects and sustainability issues involved in the management, delivery, and conservation of cultural heritage, with a specific focus on the involvement of all kinds of stakeholders so as to represent the different perspectives and communities involved in cultural heritage practices.

You can find more info about the Workshop in the link:https://ai4ch.di.unito.it

Since October 2022 the VAST project communication team initiated a series of activities in the frame of the project’s outreach plan, exploring potential collaborations and synergies with other EU projects in the Cultural Heritage domain.

A series of online meetings were realised with five EU projects, where opportunities for collaboration  and synergies were discussed whilst sharing knowledge & methodologies, policy related matters and the exploitation of the VAST Digital Platform’s tools and facilities.

rurAllure

The rurAllure project works on promoting cultural venues and heritage sites from the rural environments of Europe in the vicinity of pilgrimage routes. The starting point was the weakness behind the enormous success of pilgrimage routes: the fact that many provinces and regions of a predominantly rural nature become passive witnesses of the flows of pilgrims while they could add much content and value to their pilgrims’ experience. Thus rurAllure’s goal is to overcome this situation through the allure of the cultural heritage in the rural environment.

TExTOUR

TExTOUR is an EU-funded project that co-designs pioneering and sustainable cultural tourism strategies with the ultimate goal to improve deprived areas in Europe and beyond. To do this, it set up Cultural Tourism Labs at eight pilots located within the EU and outside it.

ARTIS

ARTIS is a consortium of research institutions in the social sciences, Art History, Philosophy, Art Education, and Art and Cultural Policy. The project aims to integrate state-of-the-art empirical approaches from psychology, neuroscience, and phenomenology to conduct a series of investigations that identify specific types of experiences with art.

ReInHerit

ReInHerit is an Horizon2020 project that aspires to disrupt the current status quo of communication, collaboration, and innovation exchange between museums and cultural heritage sites, in a sense that it will connect cultural heritage collections and sites and present Europe’s tangible and intangible heritage to citizens and tourists in their broader historical and geographical contexts. The project proposes a very innovative model of sustainable heritage management through which a dynamic network will be born.

SPICE Project

SPICE project aims to foster diverse participation in the cultural heritage domain via citizen curation, where citizen groups will share and compare their interpretations of cultural objects with other groups. Various tools will assist citizens in this process, helping them build a representation of themselves and appreciate variety and similarity across groups to enhance social cohesion.