Ai at the service of culture and history. This is the unexpected announcement made on Monday, July 21 by Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft. The American company is associated with the Ministry of Culture to create a complete digital twin of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. An initiative that comes when the restoration work in the monument is coming to an end, more than six years after the terrible fire that devastated the roof and its famous arrow.
The Giant of IT intends to contribute to the conservation of the French heritage by putting its advanced image technologies and its artificial intelligence algorithms. Every architectural detail of the Gothic building will be captured and digitized to create a Notre-Dame replica of Paris. A work that had failed at the beginning of the building’s reconstruction work and that must be used for researchers, conservatives and other restaurateurs to compare the evolution of the cathedral over time, identify wear or defects with a precision of one centimeter, it is said.
Microsoft will trust the French company Iconem, a digital specialist with whom he has already designed a replica of the Basilica Saint-Pierre to the Vatican (with more than 400,000 photographs and algorithms of AI), but also worked on a broader project around the unique release files with the Museum of the Invasters. A partner with whom the American has established deep technological links and with whom he shares the same vision: to build the digital bases so that the heritage crosses the ages.
This project, which begins, and should see the daylight in two years, will subsequently be integrated into the Notre-Dame Museum in Paris and administered in the French state by Microsoft.
Other associations for conservation and digital sustainability of French inheritance
Microsoft has embarked on cultural digitalization in the world for more than six years. Only in France, other projects have emerged or are underway. The Musée Du Plan-Lelief in Paris has been digitized, including its Mont-Saint-Michel model dating from 1702, and a project is being carried out with the National Library of France to digitize almost 1,500 decorations of the Paris Opera, some that date from the early nineteenth century, but also with the Museum of Decorative Arts (1.5 million articles). All this will be available later for educational experiences and as a database for research.
And Notre-Dame digital twin is a link in a larger Microsoft program aimed at preserving the cultural and linguistic wealth of Europe in the digital age. In Strasbourg, the centers will be implemented to develop multilingual models, including the University of Strasbourg. On September 1, a call for projects will be launched to digitize content in 10 surrender European languages (Greek, Maltese, Estonian, Alsaciano, etc.). Microsoft will finance, sponsor and technically help the selected proposals. And this could affect university files, private collections, libraries, etc.
As part of its AI culture program, Microsoft aims to save languages, monuments and artifacts thanks to a technology that “must reflect the wealth of humanity and not strip it.” A way to “ensure that AI does not erase linguistic and cultural diversity, but strengthens it,” says Brad Smith.
Train AI models in local data to be more appropriate
Because Microsoft began from a simple observation in AI training: “Internet is very biased in favor of English content,” he acknowledges the manager. “Only 5% of people have English as a native language in the world. But when we look at languages on the Internet, English is, in fact, most.” Then, the manufacturer will lead to its models of AI in more local data, to also adjust their responses to more appropriate historical, cultural or social data for local populations. And this will also make it possible not to exclude the future services of AI certain languages that are not very represented online, some of which are considered by UNESCO (Romonche, Occitan, Breton …) despite a deep cultural heritage, but that are not backed by the current AI systems due to lack of data.
But it is ensured that regulatory tensions recently found with the European Commission have nothing to do with this gesture that could be similar to an extended political hand. “What we do will have no impact on regulatory decisions. This is not the goal,” he insists in front of a audience of European journalists. However, the message seems clear: a useful for Europe must be trained in Europe, in local and European data. A way also for Microsoft to be distinguished from other technological giants playing the Cultural Cooperation Letter and Digital Ark Noah for cultural heritage and linguistic diversity thanks to AI.
Source: BFM TV
