CANAL

CANAL study on dating images to be presented at CUDAN and CHR 2023

2023-10-10T09:45:00+00:00

Contributions based on the paper ‘Blind Dates: Examining the Expression of Temporality in Historical Photographs’ by CANAL members Alexandra Barancová, Melvin Wevers and Nanne van Noord have been accepted to two upcoming conferences: Computational Humanities Research (CHR) and CUDAN. The study experiments with the task of ‘dating’ historical photographs using OpenCLIP, aiming to extend our understanding of the visual representation of time and its influence on image interpretation. This is situated within a broader goal of developing more temporally-aware computer vision and multimodal models.

CHR will be held on 6 – 9 December 2023 in Paris, France.

CUDAN will be held on 13 – 16 December 2023 in Tallinn, Estonia.

Call for papers for CultMM, MMM 2024

2023-06-15T12:45:00+00:00

As part of the 30th International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM), CANAL members Nanne van Noord and Melvin Wevers are co-organising the CultMM: Cultural AI in Multimedia special session. The session aims to bring together experts from Cultural AI and Multimedia to discuss the challenges surrounding cultural data as well as the complexities of human culture.

The call for contributions to the CultMM special session is now open, welcoming technical papers and position papers. The deadline for submission is 4 September 2023.

The conference will be held on 29 January – 2 February 2024 in Amsterdam.

Find more information about CultMM and the call for papers here.

Seminar Series ‘Interdisciplinary Perspectives on AI & Culture: Art and Science In Conversation’

2023-01-24T12:45:00+00:00

CANAL and the ASCA Research Group AI and Cultural Production are organising the seminar series ‘Interdisciplinary Perspectives on AI & Culture: Art and Science In Conversation’. Across four sessions, the series aims to identify gaps in how different disciplines conceptualise AI in culture and culture in AI:

Session 1: ‘Iconic images’ (February 21), Nanne Van Noord and Claudio Celis Bueno. → Register.
Session 2: ‘Prediction and causality’ (March 28), Melvin Wevers and Sara Magliacane. → Register.
Session 3: ‘Bias and metrics’ (April 18), Dieuwertje Luitse and Fernando P. Santos. → Register.
Session 4: ‘Creativity and AI in Cinema’ (May 23), Pei-Sze Chow and Carlo Bretti. → Register

All four sessions will take place at 15:00-17:00 at the Institute for Advanced Study (Sweelinck Room, Oude Turfmarkt 147, 1012 GC Amsterdam).

The seminars will be hybrid (in-person and Zoom). Participation is free, please register if you would like to attend. Links with more information per session, including registration details, will be added above when available.

The seminar series will culminate in a roundtable discussion in June 2023 where we will ‘hack’ current imaginations/misconceptions, as well as methodologies of researching and applying AI in cultural contexts. More details on this will follow.

CANAL at CHR 2022

2022-12-06T23:45:00+00:00

Between December 12–14, CANAL will take part in this year’s edition of the Computational Humanities Research (CHR) conference held in Antwerp, Belgium. During the conference two papers co-authored by members of the lab will be presented: ‘What Shall We Do With the Unseen Sailor? Estimating the Size of the Dutch East India Company Using an Unseen Species Model’ by Melvin Wevers, Folgert Karsdorp and Jelle van Lottum and The Computational Memorability of Iconic Images by Lisa Saleh and Nanne van Noord.

A full overview of the research presented at the conference is available in the CHR 2022 proceedings.

Panel at Cultures in AI/AI in Culture Workshop

2022-11-29T00:45:00+00:00

CANAL will participate in the Cultures in AI/AI in Culture NeurIPS workshop on December 9. During the workshop, Nanne van Noord will present the white paper “An Analytics of Culture: Modeling Subjectivity, Scalability, Contextuality, and Temporality” as part of a panel entitled “Frameworks of AI/Culture Entanglement”.

Cultures in AI/AI in Culture is a cross-disciplinary workshop with experts in AI/ML and social sciences discussing how AI influences culture and how culture influences AI. The event is part of NeurIPS 2022 and will be held virtually between 9:00-15:30 PST. A detailed description, including the schedule and an overview of all participants can be found here.

Please note that registration for NeurIPS 2022 is required to attend the workshop.

Tag the Picture Launched

2022-11-28T07:00:00+00:00

On November 24, 2022, Tropenmuseum Amsterdam launched the annotation platform Tag the Picture. This platform enables volunteers to enrich images in the colonial collection of the museum. In the future, the open-source platform will also be applied to different collection. During the launch, Melvin Wevers gave a short presentation that detailed how AI will be applied to data generated on this platform. Crowd-sourced annotations will be used to optimize image and object classification algorithm, to assess whether existing metadata is biased, and whether this metadata can be improved and further enriched.

CANAL White Paper at NeurIPS Fest 2022

2022-11-14T10:31:14+00:00

On November 24, Nanne van Noord & Melvin Wevers will present the white paper “An Analytics of Culture: Modeling Subjectivity, Scalability, Contextuality, and Temporality” at NeurIPS Fest 2022. The NeurIPS Fest 2022 is a preview party of the machine learning research which are happening in the Amsterdam AI Ecosystem and will be showcased at the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

The event will take place at Lab42 at the Startup Village in Amsterdam Science Park. Read more about the programme and register here.

CANAL at Data Science Day 2022

2022-10-11T10:31:14+00:00

On Thursday 13th of October Melvin Wevers will present the Cultural Analytics Lab (CANAL) during UvA’s annual Data Science Day. The event will take place at Startup Village in Amsterdam Science Park. Read more about the programme and register here.

A copy of the pitch presentation outlining the lab’s aim, setup and challenges is available here.

Alexandra Barancová joins CANAL

2022-09-14T08:00:23+00:00

From September the Cultural Analytics Lab (CANAL) welcomed Alexandra Barancová, who is joining the team as Junior Researcher. Alexandra will be working with Melvin Wevers and Nanne van Noord on ongoing research at CANAL.

Alexandra is an artist and researcher whose work moves between art and theory in the domain of digital culture. Her interests include questions surrounding the boundaries of fiction, the algorithmic imaginary or embodiment in virtual spaces. She holds an MSc in Media Technology from Leiden University.

CANAL launched!

2022-09-01T14:31:14+00:00

On the 1st of September 2022 the Cultural Analytics Lab (CANAL) was launched! CANAL is a cross-faculty lab at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), with the mission to co-develop and co-research culturally-aware artifical intelligence methods from a perspective that is both critical and ethical.

Within the lab, researchers will collaborate on projects surrounding three core research themes: global cultural analytics; modeling complex, dynamic systems; computational visual studies.

CANAL is based in Amsterdam at the Bushuis.