The project website is live. From now on, this is the place where we share what PASTFORWARD.AI is doing, what we are learning, and what we are publishing.
For those just arriving: PASTFORWARD.AI is a four-year project at KIK-IRPA, the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Brussels, funded by BELSPO through the Policy 4 Science programme. We investigate how existing open-source AI models can help heritage institutions, with five applications at the centre: reverse image search, document querying with retrieval-augmented generation, metadata enrichment, contextual translation and advanced OCR.
We are currently in the first phase of the project. That means laying foundations: setting up data management and the AI ethics framework, and surveying the landscape of open-source models and of AI initiatives at other heritage institutions. Not the most spectacular part of a research project, but the part that decides whether the spectacular bits later actually work.
On the site you will find the full project structure with its work packages, timeline and deliverables, an introduction to the five applications, and our approach to ethics and data. The downloads page will grow as reports, presentations and code become available.
We will post here when there is something worth telling. Expect updates on milestones, summaries of what we found, and the occasional honest note about what did not work. Thanks for reading.
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