UPCArts has partnered with Saint George on a Bike (SGoaB), an EU-funded project coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), in order to launch a new crowdsourcing campaign to train artificial intelligence in cultural heritage.
This campaign provides thousands of 12th to 18th century European paintings from the project repository. Volunteers can log onto the website and help in three steps: write descriptions for the paintings, put searchable keywords and compare them to modern images with similar elements. What makes this campaign different from many others is that descriptions can be written in Catalan, Spanish and English. This makes the activity more inclusive to those who might be more comfortable contributing in their preferred languages.
“We are happy to join forces with UPCArts for this crowdsourcing campaign,” said BSC Senior Researcher and SGoaB Coordinator Maria Cristina Marinescu. “We hope that the UPCArts community, which includes students and working professionals, will be able to provide us with rich descriptions that can help us feed our machine learning algorithms so that they may be able to create multilingual automatic captions in the future.”
The Director of Culture and Community of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Carme Fenoll, shared that crowdsourcing campaigns such as these result in benefits for all those involved. “Not only will research projects gain more data, but they can also help our volunteers – mostly young people from the UPCArts community – appreciate and learn about elements of our cultural heritage,” she said.
About Saint George on a Bike
Co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union, Saint George on a Bike´s main objective is to provide high-performance metadata enrichment capability by using HPC resources in the cultural heritage domain. The project consortium, composed of researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Europeana, runs from 1 September 2019 to 31 August 2022 with a budget of nearly €1.5M.
Help the Saint George on a Bike project caption their images: http://growsmarter.bsc.es/upcarts
Learn more about the Saint George on a Bike project: https://saintgeorgeonabike.eu/
