📌 About Our Guests

Henk Vanstappen & Tobias Hendrickx | MODAL

🌐 https://www.linkedin.com/in/henkvanstappen/  

🌐 https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobias-hendrickx-77b804123/ 

🌐 https://advn.be/nl/over-advn/projecten/modal-project 

Henk Vanstappen is co-founder and senior consultant at Datable, where he advises cultural heritage organisations on digital strategies connecting technology, data and collections. With a background in Arts and Philosophy and Information Sciences, he has worked on digital heritage projects since 2004, with expertise in digitisation, metadata, digital collections and emerging technologies such as machine learning and generative AI.

Tobias Hendrickx works at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, where he is involved in the management and accessibility of the museum’s digital archives. Within MODAL, he explored how AI can help make born-digital fashion archives more discoverable, including through speech-to-text and metadata generation.

MODAL (Metadata and Access to Digital Archives using Large Language Models) is a two-year research project supported by the Flemish Government, investigating how generative AI can support the cultural heritage sector. The project aims to develop a practical application for archivists and collection managers, helping them explore large born-digital archives and make faster decisions about processing and eventually opening up their collections. Alongside the technology, MODAL also focuses on sharing knowledge and encouraging collaboration around AI and cultural heritage.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI

📌 About Our Guests

Winnie Lam | plinth

🌐 linkedin.com/in/wingyanlam

🌐 https://plinth.it/ 

Winnie Lam is the Co-Founder of Plinth, where she leads the company’s vision for expanding the reuse of digital cultural heritage. Her work focuses on how cultural institutions can transform digitised collections into creative experiences that generate wider public value.

With a background spanning technology, entrepreneurship, and cultural innovation, Winnie is particularly interested in the role of bridge actors who connect heritage assets with audiences and real-world uses. She is currently exploring how AI can unlock the value of Europe’s text-based heritage through more meaningful discovery, interpretation, and responsible reuse. 

Plinth is an organisation that uses 3D digitisation and AI driven technologies to make cultural heritage more accessible and engaging. It helps museums, galleries and other cultural institutions create detailed digital versions of artworks and connect collections through semantic search, making it easier for people to discover, explore and reuse cultural heritage.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI

📌 About Our Guests

Matthias Priem & Bart Magnus | meemoo

🌐 linkedin.com/in/matthiaspriem

🌐 linkedin.com/in/bart-magnus-557b384

🌐 https://meemoo.be/

Matthias Priem is a Manager of Archiving at meemoo, Flemish institute for archives, a Belgian organisation that provides services on digital heritage processes to cultural, media and government organisations in Flanders. His professional background includes working with infrastructure, software, and metadata, and he studied as an Electronics Engineer at Katholieke Hogeschool 'Sint-Lieven' in Ghent.

Bart Magnus works as an expertise officer at meemoo, Flemish institute for archives, a Belgian organisation that provides services on digital heritage processes to cultural, media and government organisations in Flanders. Bart's domains of work include open data, legal and ethical aspects of AI and GLAM. He's a big fan of public domain, open knowledge, Wikimedia, Creative Commons and of course, Internet Archive.

Meemoo is a Flemish non-profit organisation supported by the government that helps cultural, media, and civic institutions digitally safeguard their heritage. It specialises in digitising, managing, and preserving valuable audiovisual materials, historical newspapers, and artworks to make these accessible and usable for the public, researchers, and educational platforms.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI

📌 About Our Guests

Juha Henriksson | Europeana

🌐 https://www.linkedin.com/in/juha-henriksson-maf/ 

Juha Henriksson has been the Director of Music Archive Finland since 1997. He has a master's degree in computer science and a doctorate in musicology. He works as a Partnership Manager for Time Machine Organisation and is an Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology at the University of Helsinki.

Henriksson is Europeana Ambassador and he is involved in many international initiatives and organisations such as the common European data space for cultural heritage, the Cultural Heritage Cloud, EIT Culture & Creativity, AI4LAM, Open Heritage Coalition, and the Virtual Worlds Association.

Based on his diverse background and experience, he examines artificial intelligence from many different perspectives. For example, he is currently on the steering groups of Europeana's Impact, Copyright, Climate Action and EuropeanaTech Communities.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI

📌 About Our Guests

Annamaria Van Ingelgem & Eva Andersen | Glashelder

🌐 https://www.linkedin.com/in/evaandersenprofile/ 

🌐 https://www.linkedin.com/in/annamaria-van-ingelgem-7b6662277/ 

🌐 https://boekentoren.gent/nl/artikels/categorie/glashelder 

Annamaria van Ingelgem is part of the Digital Heritage Collections team at Ghent University’s Boekentoren. She works on digitising and making the library’s extensive heritage collections accessible, while collaborating on innovative digital projects such as Glashelder. 

Eva Andersen is the project and data manager for Glashelder. She oversees the project’s work packages, goals and milestones, while also working on communication and helping coordinate the development of its AI-based approach to processing the collection. 

Glashelder is a research project that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to describe 62,000 digitised glass plates and make them accessible to the public.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI

📌 About Our Guests

Derek Lomas | Embassy of the Free Mind / TU Delft

🌐 https://www.linkedin.com/in/dereklomas/ 

🌐 https://www.derek-lomas.com 

🌐 https://sourcelibrary.org

Derek Lomas is a cognitive scientist, designer, and entrepreneur. He has designed 35+ educational games and over a dozen games for psychological assessment, reaching more than 3 million students and earning recognition from Sesame Street, the White House, the MacArthur Foundation, DARPA, and the NYC Department of Education. He has conducted research with over 100,000 learners and is CEO of Playpower Labs, where he helps digital education companies leverage data, technology, and design. His mission is to enhance global wellbeing through artificial intelligence and humanistic design.

Source Library is a project that uses AI to translate and make accessible thousands of pre-modern texts, including Renaissance works that have remained largely untranslated for centuries.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI

He also addresses legal and data-access challenges in public institutions and envisions expanding the project internationally, improving metadata, and enhancing voice interaction. His key takeaway: explore and “play” with open data to create engaging, human-centered cultural experiences.

📌 HoAI Highlights

⏲️[00:00] Intro

⏲️[00:35] The Spark

⏲️[06:11] The Impact

⏲️[10:05] The Challenge

⏲️[14:15] The Future

⏲️[18:36] The Takeaway

The Spark

🗣️“I like to work closely with institutions… it’s a joint process, and that’s what makes it special.”

The Impact

🗣️ “AI acted as a translator between archived images and user queries, creating a common ground that made search and exploration possible.”

The Challenge

🗣️ “Public institutions face legal and access challenges that limit how open data can be used, creating a gap between what corporations and small organizations can do with AI.”

The Future

🗣️“AI enables us to quickly build specific, playful applications with open data, merging coding and design in ways that were previously too costly or complex.”

The Takeaway

🗣️ “Go and play with the data—use open archives as a playground to explore, experiment, and build your own vision.”

📌 About Our Guests

Kai Jauslin | Webarchiving Display

🌐 linkedin.com/in/kjauslin
🌐 https://nextension.com/ 

🌐 https://webarchiving.internetarchive.eu/

The Webarchiving Display project turns archived websites into interactive, navigable visualizations, letting the public explore historical web content through AI-enhanced search and voice interaction.

#AI #artificialintelligence #generativeAI

Daniel emphasizes that the challenge isn’t solutions, but making decisions faster and more rationally. As AI shapes how we understand and respond to climate risks, transparent, human-centered models are key to accelerating a safe, carbon-neutral future.

📌 HoAI Highlights

⏲️[00:00] Intro

⏲️[00:30] The Spark

⏲️[07:32] The Impact

⏲️[12:13] The Challenge

⏲️[15:36] The Future

⏲️[19:33] The Takeaway

The Spark

🗣️“By combining a decade of extreme weather data, SDGs, and scientific research, ClimateGPT gives humanity a clear, actionable view of climate impacts and interventions.”

The Impact

🗣️ “By building small, efficient, and open AI models grounded in scientific data, we can empower anyone to make informed, anticipatory decisions on climate risks at planetary scale.”

The Challenge

🗣️ “AI can help humanity access the best climate knowledge and make faster, smarter, and safer decisions for a carbon-neutral future.”

The Future

🗣️“Grounding AI in data and observations helps policymakers make transparent, rational decisions for a carbon-neutral future.”

The Takeaway

🗣️ “We often forget that, despite the challenges, we should focus on the hopeful future we want to create for ourselves, our children, and our children’s children.”

📌 About Our Guests

Daniel Erasmus | ClimateGPT

🌐 linkedin.com/in/daniel-erasmus-94282 

🌐 https://climategpt.ai

ClimateGPT is an open-source AI platform designed to support climate decision-making by turning complex climate science and data into clear, actionable insights. It is built specifically for climate use cases, helping researchers, policymakers, and organizations analyze risks, policies, and scenarios. The goal of ClimateGPT is to democratize access to trustworthy, science-based climate intelligence worldwide.

#AI #artificialintelligence #generativeAI

Harry argues that the real challenge is not technology but adoption, governance, and public trust. As chatbots increasingly replace search engines as the main interface to knowledge, he warns that without sustained public investment and engagement, Europe’s cultural diversity risks becoming invisible in an AI-driven future.

📌 HoAI Highlights

⏲️[00:00] Intro

⏲️[00:48] The Spark

⏲️[02:47] The Impact

⏲️[09:41] The Challenge

⏲️[14:56] The Future

⏲️[20:10] The Takeaway

The Spark

🗣️“Culture heritage belongs to all of us. Why would exclusive access to that only happen through a private entity?”

The Impact

🗣️ “The data really is like a garden, you need to keep nurturing it, because what is a derogative term today may change in the future.”

The Challenge

🗣️ “I don’t think it’s a technological challenge.Tthe technology is there. The question is how do we implement that more widely.”

The Future

🗣️“Library and archival data are the original datasets, and with them comes a value system of authenticity and provenance that AI should inherit.”

The Takeaway

🗣️ “AI chatbot interfaces will be how people interface with knowledge—and if we don’t engage with them, our culture risks becoming invisible."

📌 About Our Guests

Harry Verwayen | Europeana

🌐 linkedin.com/in/harryverwayen

🌐 https://www.europeana.eu/en

Europeana is a digital platform that provides access to millions of cultural heritage items from museums, galleries, libraries, and archives across Europe. It promotes the sharing and reuse of Europe’s cultural collections for education, research, and creativity.

#AI #artificialintelligence #generativeAI

The episode highlights key findings—such as how briefly most visitors view artworks—and reflects on the ethical limits of AI, the difference between observing behavior and understanding motivation, and the importance of using AI thoughtfully in cultural heritage and beyond.

📌 HoAI Highlights

⏲️[00:00] Intro

⏲️[00:15] The Spark

⏲️[04:32] The Impact

⏲️[07:49] The Challenge

⏲️[13:42] The Future

⏲️[18:51] The Takeaway

The Spark

🗣️“The management at the Bowes were concerned that perhaps this is overwhelming for visitors… do we know that visitors are actually enjoying themselves?”

The Impact

🗣️ “It was horrifying to me how very quickly most people look at things in museums… it’s like 10 seconds, 15 seconds sometimes per painting.”

The Challenge

🗣️ “It is very, very important this is done ethically… because people know they’re being observed, it may change their behavior.”

The Future

🗣️“If we can’t compete in AI, we have no role in regulating what is going on in those organizations.”

The Takeaway

🗣️ “AI is not a terrible thing or a wonderful thing—we need to think about how we use it, where we use it, and where it’s most appropriate.”

📌 About Our Guests

Claire Warwick | Museum Goggles

🌐 linkedin.com/in/claire-warwick-1951272b6 

The Bowes Museum “goggles” project used AI-powered eye-tracking glasses to study how visitors view paintings and labels. The research showed that most people look at artworks very quickly, but engaging with labels increases viewing time and enjoyment. The project highlights how AI can analyze behavior at scale while also raising ethical questions and showing its limits in understanding why people do what they do.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI

Anna discusses training models to reproduce Molière’s alexandrines, extending the work to Brecht, and the challenges of capturing each writer’s distinct voice. The conversation highlights how AI can revive cultural memory, engage young people with theatre, and support human-centered artistic research.

📌 HoAI Highlights

⏲️[00:00] Intro

⏲️[00:33] The Spark

⏲️[04:08] The Impact

⏲️[07:59] The Challenge

⏲️[12:17] The Future

⏲️[16:39] The Takeaway

The Spark

🗣️“We wanted to use AI not just as a tool, but as a mediator — a way to bring humans into a new dialogue with the past, almost like speaking with a literary ghost made alive again.”

The Impact

🗣️ “It wasn’t just a tool — AI became a bridge to the past.”

The Challenge

🗣️ “Artistic research struggles because we lack access to large computing resources.”

The Future

🗣️“For me, fine-tuning was a way to test how far AI can go in producing not just a writer’s style, but a writer’s way of thinking.”

The Takeaway

🗣️ “We should share these experiences widely — even with philosophers — because they can bring theatre, literature, and philosophy closer to young people.”

Litte_bot is an artistic research project that uses AI to bring classical theatre to life by enabling audiences to interact directly with literary characters. Originally created to celebrate Molière’s 400th anniversary, the team trained generative models on his plays so the chatbot could respond in authentic alexandrines, making cultural memory feel alive and accessible—especially for young people.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI

📌 HoAI Highlights

⏲️[00:00] Intro

⏲️[00:54] The Spark

⏲️[03:28] The Impact

⏲️[08:58] The Challenge

⏲️[12:58] The Future

⏲️[18:37] The Takeaway

The Spark

🗣️“Cultural heritage institutions now have the opportunity to jump on the train of AI and stay in the game.”

The Impact

🗣️ “The shift from manual work to the intellectual power of people is the biggest change AI can help us achieve.”

The Challenge

🗣️ “AI is evolving so fast that nobody can really adapt to it — and institutions are left without a roadmap for how to implement it.”

The Future

🗣️“The new language is happening online, not in published books — and we need to treat that digital space as cultural heritage.”

The Takeaway

🗣️ ““AI is here and it’s going to stay — it’s better that we use it, adapt it, and see it as a tool that helps us work.”

📌 About Our Guests

Dr. Ines Vodopivec | AI4LAM

🌐 linkedin.com/in/ines-vodopivec 

🌐https://sites.google.com/view/ai4lam

AI4LAM is a global community of libraries, archives, and museums working together to responsibly integrate AI into cultural heritage. They promote collaboration, develop practical tools and workflows, support multilingual access, and help institutions use AI to improve discovery, preservation, and public engagement.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI

Aíri and Pau share how the project began during the 2015 refugee crisis and grew into a global effort to support communities affected by migration, conflict, and displacement. They discuss their unique methodology, the importance of culturally aware datasets, and how early “imperfect” AI models can actually deepen emotional recall. They also explore how synthetic memory techniques are now being tested in therapeutic contexts, including work with dementia patients.

📌 HoAI Highlights

⏲️[00:00] Intro

⏲️[00:16] The Spark

⏲️[03:40] The Impact

⏲️[08:18] The Challenge

⏲️[15:55] The Future

⏲️[21:38] The Takeaway

The Spark

🗣️“Being a refugee is not about losing your home — it’s about losing the answer to where do I come from?”

The Impact

🗣️ “AI can help preserve what displacement, conflict, and disaster try to erase.”

The Challenge

🗣️ “Archives are biased per se — so re-biasing a model means taking responsibility for representing a culture in all its richness.”

The Future

🗣️“AI should help us understand and connect with each other, not just control or optimise.”

The Takeaway

🗣️ “The value of a well-used tool is not in what it produces for us, but in what it produces within us.”

📌 About Our Guests

Airí Dordas & Pau Aleikum | Synthetic Memories

🌐 linkedin.com/in/airidordas  

🌐 linkedin.com/in/pauerrr 

🌐 http://www.syntheticmemories.net

Synthetic Memories is a research initiative by Domestic Data Streamers that uses generative AI to help people visually reconstruct memories lost through migration, conflict, or time. Built around guided conversations, the project turns personal recollections into emotionally resonant images while addressing cultural and historical bias through close collaboration with local communities. By focusing on identity, healing, and connection, Synthetic Memories shows how AI can preserve stories at risk of disappearing—and support both cultural memory and therapeutic work.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI

📌 HoAI Highlights

⏲️[00:00] Intro

⏲️[00:30] The Spark

⏲️[02:04] The Impact

⏲️[05:21] The Challenge

⏲️[08:44] The Future

⏲️[12:40] The Takeaway

The Spark

🗣️“Twenty years of digitisation was a leap of faith — but it’s now the foundation that makes Norwegian AI possible.”

The Impact

🗣️“Our models are used everywhere — from hospitals and police work to newsrooms. The impact is huge, and so are the expectations.”

The Challenge

🗣️“LLMs changed the game. Agreements written before generative AI suddenly didn’t fit anymore, and we had to rethink everything with rights holders.”

The Future

🗣️“We want models that protect privacy, run locally, and reflect Norwegian values — and expand into speech and visual AI in a responsible way.”

The Takeaway

🗣️“If restrictions become too heavy, small public institutions can’t contribute — and Europe risks losing its voice in AI.”

📌 About Our Guests

Javier de la Rosa | KB Norway

🌐 linkedin.com/in/versae 

🌐 https://ai.nb.no 

The National Library of Norway runs NbAiLab, an applied AI programme that develops open language, speech, and image models based on the library’s extensive digitised collections. The lab focuses on improving access to Norwegian cultural heritage through AI-driven tools such as text and handwriting recognition, speech-to-text, and automated metadata enrichment, while openly sharing models and datasets to support the wider research and GLAM community.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI

Daniel shares his journey from studying library science to exploring how machine learning can empower libraries, archives, and museums. He discusses the Living with Machines project, his early experiments with FastAI, and how the Big GLAM initiative grew into a global effort to make cultural heritage datasets accessible for ethical and transparent AI development.

📌 HoAI Highlights

⏲️[00:00] Intro

⏲️[00:24] The Spark

⏲️[03:23] The Impact

⏲️[10:05] The Challenge

⏲️[13:45] The Future

⏲️[20:32] The Takeaway

The Spark

🗣️“Even something as simple as an image classifier can be incredibly useful for libraries — the challenge is adapting these tools to real-world GLAM contexts.”

The Impact

🗣️ “People often focus on models, but data is what really lasts. If we want AI to work for cultural heritage, we need to see datasets as shared infrastructure.”

The Challenge

🗣️ “Funding and copyright uncertainty are holding institutions back — we can’t expect the GLAM sector to lead innovation without long-term investment and legal clarity.”

The Future

🗣️“There’s an opportunity for libraries to collaborate on evaluation datasets and task-specific models that reflect their own values and missions.”

The Takeaway

🗣️ “Models might fade, but well-built datasets can last a decade — that’s where sustainable progress begins.”

📌 About Our Guests

Daniel van Strien | Hugging Face & Big GLAM

🌐 linkedin.com/in/danielvanstrien 

🌐 https://huggingface.co/biglam 

Big GLAM is a global open science initiative hosted on Hugging Face that gathers datasets from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums to support ethical, community-driven machine learning. By fostering collaboration and transparency, Big GLAM helps cultural institutions engage with AI in ways that respect public values and strengthen the digital commons.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI

Melissa talks about turning damaged ancient manuscripts into searchable digital archives, the journey from academic research to a cooperative business model, and why AI should serve communities — not corporations. She reflects on lessons from the project’s growth, the importance of human networks, and her vision for a future where AI is sustainable, transparent, and keeps humans in the loop.

📌 HoAI Highlights

⏲️[00:00] Intro

⏲️[00:21] The Spark

⏲️[08:25] The Impact

⏲️[13:54] The Challenge

⏲️[18:19] The Future

⏲️[24:11] The Takeaway

The Spark

🗣️“We’re building tools that let people turn images of the past into knowledge for the future.”

The Impact

🗣️ “To have learned about this poet at school and now help make her diaries accessible to everyone — that was a really nice full-circle moment for me.”

The Challenge

🗣️ “All of this is about information literacy — and AI companies don’t want people to be literate about AI. They want to disrupt, take the money, and run.”

The Future

🗣️“If we want a better AI world, we need to look at the business models — and encourage more people to build AI cooperatively.”

The Takeaway

🗣️ “AI is just a tool. What we choose to do with it is on us.”

📌 About Our Guests

Melissa Terras | Transkribus

🌐 linkedin.com/in/melissa-terras-mbe-freng-8658714 

🌐 https://www.transkribus.org 

Transkribus is a cooperative AI platform that uses handwriting recognition and machine learning to turn historical documents into searchable, machine-readable text. Co-owned by libraries, archives, museums, and individuals, it helps researchers and institutions digitize and analyze millions of handwritten records while ensuring data ethics and community-driven sustainability.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI