Title Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash
The rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT) has unleashed tremendous potential to gather, organize, and generate knowledge. In the information age of today, we are getting increasingly equipped with powerful and fast-paced tools to learn, coordinate, and organize ourselves in unimaginably comprehensive ways. As more and more societal spheres are applying ICT, it is worth mentioning here some of the amazing initiatives and projects that are emerging in the areas of culture, history, astronomy, and many more.
The Next Rembrandt
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) is considered one of the greatest painters in the history of art. Encyclopedia Britannica describes him as “possessing an exceptional ability to render people in their various moods and dramatic guises.”1 His world-famous paintings like The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) and The Night Watch (1642) serve as ideal examples for his ingenious ability to make darkness and light interplay with each other.
In the year 2016, meaning 347 years after Rembrandt’s death, a consortium of the ING Group, Microsoft, TU Delft, and the art museum Mauritshuis, brought the great artist to life again. They used the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and 3D printing to create a Rembrandt painting that was actually never painted.
In the course of an 18 month–long process, they analyzed 346 of Rembrandt’s paintings, i.e., statistically identified his typical brushstrokes and motifs. On the basis of the gathered data, it took a software system over 500 hours to calculate a typical Rembrandt painting. As his original paintings were not two-dimensional, the algorithms likewise created a painting with multiple layers of paint. Eventually, a 3D printer produced the digital model of The Next Rembrandt in 13 printing layers. You can visit the project’s website to learn more details.
The Moral Machine
The future of transportation pictures streets full of self-driving cars. Yet, the use of self-driving cars comes with a bunch of unresolved ethical dilemmas. Boston-based MIT Media Lab researched the field of AI and presented The Moral Machine—to highlight the use of AI in the context of self-driving cars.
Professor Iyad Rahwan and his team created The Moral Machine, which is a platform that asks people from all over the world to decide on dilemmas related to car accidents. The platform’s idea is to open a discussion for a kind of decision-making that, in a world without self-driving cars, nobody but coincidences can be made accountable for. In car accidents made by sober drivers, they cannot be blamed for their particular choices because, many times, such accidents occur so quickly, it becomes impossible to process different scenarios and make grounded decisions.
Now, the replacement of human drivers with AI-driven systems alters the situation. The design of automated decision-making systems expects us to make some extremely tough decisions in advance. If a crash is unavoidable, should the AI decide in favor of a child or a blind person crossing the street instead? The Moral Machine’s purpose is to confront people from all over the world with such ethical dilemmas to gather data on how we should proceed.
Between 2016 and 2020, this platform gathered millions of answers from participants living in 233 countries and territories. Worldwide, people mostly agree on saving as many lives as possible, preferring legal behavior, saving human beings over animals, and saving the greater number. However, the results mirror also cultural differences, for instance, the French and Italian participants chose more often to rescue women.
In case you are interested in the experiment’s more detailed results, check them out by using an interactive world map, reading the research paper, or watching a video clip that sums up this research project.
Europe’s Time Machine
The European continent has a rich history that finds its expression in the vast cultural heritage originating from various historical epochs. Countless maps, registers, magazines, sculptures, artifacts, photographs, and videos document the cultural, sociological, and geographic development of the continent. The Time Machine’s objective is nothing less than to digitize those mediums in order to create a comprehensive digital twin of European history through emerging technology, such as big data analysis and processing, machine learning, and intelligent modeling.
Vienna-based and EU-funded, the Time Machine Organisation (TMO)serves as a hub to combine and coordinate the efforts of more than 250 universities, private companies, research centers, and archives across Europe that are digitizing their local and national collections.
The digital twin shall enable future generations to access and explore European history, in its comprehensiveness, through a fully immersive experience and time travel. However, we are currently facing some serious challenges: insufficient computing capacities and metadata management to contextualize the digitized objects and storage inefficiency, to name a few. Learn more about theTime Machine’smethodologyon the project’s website.
Outlook
Even in the light of our daily implementation of ICT for communication, education, work, and leisure activities, it seems like we are still at the very beginning of the information age. Given its democratizing and accessible characteristics, ICT serves as a great enabler for a large number of creative enthusiasts and entrepreneurs. Hence, one thing is certain; in the near future, there will be even more reasons to raise our eyebrows. If you are intrigued enough by now, check out our database of innovative projects, initiatives, and start-ups.
