Lack of data is a recurring problem in Artificial Intelligence, as it is essential for training and validating models. This is particularly true in the field of cultural heritage, where the number of open datasets is relatively limited and where the data collected does not always allow for holistic modeling of visitors' experience due to the fact that data are ad hoc (i.e. restricted to the sole characteristics required for the evaluation of a specific model). To overcome this lack, we conducted a study between February and March 2019 aimed at obtaining comprehensive and detailed information about visitors, their visit experience and their feedback. We equipped 51 participants with eye-tracking glasses, leaving them free to explore the 3 floors of the museum for an average of 57 minutes, and to discover an exhibition of more than 400 artworks. On this basis, we built an open dataset combining contextual data (demographic data, preferences, visiting habits, motivations, social context. . . ), behavioral data (spatiotemporal trajectories, gaze data) and feedback (satisfaction, fatigue, liked artworks, verbatim. . . ). Our analysis made it possible to re-enact visitor identities combining the majority of characteristics found in the literature and to reproduce the Veron and Levasseur profiles. This dataset will ultimately make it possible to improve the quality of recommended paths in museums by personalizing the number of points of interest (POIs), the time spent at these different POIs, and the amount of information to be provided to each visitor based on their level of interest.
Luca Garello, Francesca Cocchella, Alessandra Sciutti
et al.
Autonomous robots are increasingly being tested into public spaces to enhance user experiences, particularly in cultural and educational settings. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of the autonomous museum guide robot Alter-Ego equipped with advanced navigation and interactive capabilities. The robot leverages state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide real-time, context aware question-and-answer (Q&A) interactions, allowing visitors to engage in conversations about exhibits. It also employs robust simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) techniques, enabling seamless navigation through museum spaces and route adaptation based on user requests. The system was tested in a real museum environment with 34 participants, combining qualitative analysis of visitor-robot conversations and quantitative analysis of pre and post interaction surveys. Results showed that the robot was generally well-received and contributed to an engaging museum experience, despite some limitations in comprehension and responsiveness. This study sheds light on HRI in cultural spaces, highlighting not only the potential of AI-driven robotics to support accessibility and knowledge acquisition, but also the current limitations and challenges of deploying such technologies in complex, real-world environments.
Filip J. Kucia, Bartosz Grabek, Szymon D. Trochimiak
et al.
Conversational agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in educational settings, in particular in individual closed digital environments, yet their potential adoption in the physical learning environments like cultural heritage sites, museums, and art galleries remains relatively unexplored. In this study, we present Artistic Chatbot, a voice-to-voice RAG-powered chat system to support informal learning and enhance visitor engagement during a live art exhibition celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Faculty of Media Art at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, Poland. The question answering (QA) chatbot responded to free-form spoken questions in Polish using the context retrieved from a curated, domain-specific knowledge base consisting of 226 documents provided by the organizers, including faculty information, art magazines, books, and journals. We describe the key aspects of the system architecture and user interaction design, as well as discuss the practical challenges associated with deploying chatbots at public cultural sites. Our findings, based on interaction analysis, demonstrate that chatbots such as Artistic Chatbot effectively maintain responses grounded in exhibition content (60\% of responses directly relevant), even when faced with unpredictable queries outside the target domain, showing their potential for increasing interactivity in public cultural sites. GitHub project page: https://github.com/cinekucia/artistic-chatbot-cikm2025
The Virtual Garbage Collector (VGC) proposes a zone-based memory management architecture aimed at improving execution predictability and memory behavior in Python runtimes. The design explores a dual-layer model consisting of an Active VGC, responsible for managing runtime object lifecycles, and a Passive VGC, intended as a compile-time optimization layer for static allocation planning. Rather than relying on traditional heap traversal or generational heuristics, VGC introduces memory zoning and checkpoint-based state evaluation to reduce allocation churn and constrain garbage collection scope. Execution partitioning is experimentally evaluated to isolate workloads and localize memory pressure, enabling more deterministic behavior under loop-intensive, recursive, and compute-heavy workloads. This work presents the architectural principles, execution model, and experimental observations of VGC within a partition-aware runtime context. While the full realization of the dual-layer design is an ongoing effort, the results indicate that zone-based allocation and partitioned execution provide a viable foundation for improving scalability and memory predictability in Python-oriented systems.
Resumo Este trabalho parte de um olhar crítico para as epistemologias que vigoram na Ciência da Informação para analisar como as narrativas indígenas podem contribuir para uma nova abordagem aos estudos da memória e informação. Assim, ao problematizar as estruturas e narrativas hegemônicas que fundaram a área, busca-se construir um caminho decolonial de (des)envolvimento. Primeiramente, discorremos sobre como o conceito de memória vem sendo incorporado na Ciência da Informação, para, então, fundamentar a noção de Memória Ancestral. Além de construir um referencial teórico com foco nas perspectivas indígenas, ampliando a visão sobre a temática em questão, metodologicamente foram selecionados materiais produzidos pelos povos Guarani, Kaingang e Laklãnõ-Xokleng para demonstrar como a memória é compreendida por esses grupos, nos quais a oralidade desempenha um papel central nas práticas socioculturais. Como resultado, fica evidente que, ainda que atualmente, os registros dessas narrativas em suportes de informação, tais como os livros, tenham ganhado espaço e importância para essas comunidades – que os assumem como um meio de resistência e fortalecimento da memória – esses só adquirem sentido quando conectados à sua práxis. Com base nos materiais analisados, conclui-se que os sábios e sábias indígenas atuam como mediadores da informação, desempenhando um papel protagonista no processo de transmissão da sabedoria ancestral.
Museums. Collectors and collecting, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in ethnographic heritage, not only in the academic community, but among the communities, which seeks to understand the past development of the spaces it inhabits and its own roots. In this context, numerous initiatives arise in the rural setting to disseminate the characteristic aspects of the populations that shaped those territories, as is the case of the Ethnographic Museum of the Three Pasiega Villages, founded in 1988, and located in Vega de Pas (Cantabria, Spain). The purpose of this museum is related to an important spectrum in the process of heritage preservation: dissemination, in addition to their role as tourist attraction, and representing and interpreting human action in these cultural landscapes. This article main objective is to analyse the Museum de from the perspective of ethnographic research, in order to understand how it adapts the contents on pasieguería, and in what way it relates to the territory it occupies. For this purpose, the article presents and analyses the museum and its museography. We also propose an analysis following the SWOT model, which highlights the strengths and opportunities of the museum in relation to space and contents. The museum reflects a careful selection of objects and adaptation to the environment, but reveals a non-existent educational strategy adapted to a diverse audience, which denotes the complicated situation of local museums of small scale, where resources are limited and sustainability is challenged.
Erik Schlachhoff, Nils Dengler, Leif Van Holland
et al.
In 1997, the very first tour guide robot RHINO was deployed in a museum in Germany. With the ability to navigate autonomously through the environment, the robot gave tours to over 2,000 visitors. Today, RHINO itself has become an exhibit and is no longer operational. In this paper, we present RHINO-VR, an interactive museum exhibit using virtual reality (VR) that allows museum visitors to experience the historical robot RHINO in operation in a virtual museum. RHINO-VR, unlike static exhibits, enables users to familiarize themselves with basic mobile robotics concepts without the fear of damaging the exhibit. In the virtual environment, the user is able to interact with RHINO in VR by pointing to a location to which the robot should navigate and observing the corresponding actions of the robot. To include other visitors who cannot use the VR, we provide an external observation view to make RHINO visible to them. We evaluated our system by measuring the frame rate of the VR simulation, comparing the generated virtual 3D models with the originals, and conducting a user study. The user-study showed that RHINO-VR improved the visitors' understanding of the robot's functionality and that they would recommend experiencing the VR exhibit to others.
We consider a generalisation of the classical coupon collector problem. We define a super-coupon to be any $s$-subset of a universe of $n$ coupons. In each round, a random $r$-subset from the universe is drawn and all its $s$-subsets are marked as collected. We show that the time to collect all super-coupons is $\binom{r}{s}^{-1}\binom{n}{s} \log \binom{n}{s}(1 + o(1))$ on average and has a Gumbel limit after a suitable normalisation. In a similar vein, we show that for any $α\in (0, 1)$, the expected time to collect $(1 - α)$ proportion of all super-coupons is $\binom{r}{s}^{-1}\binom{n}{s} \log \big(\frac{1}α\big)(1 + o(1))$. The $r = s$ case of this model is equivalent to the classical coupon collector model. We also consider a temporally dependent model where the $r$-subsets are drawn according to the following Markovian dynamics: the $r$-subset at round $k + 1$ is formed by replacing a random coupon from the $r$-subset drawn at round $k$ with another random coupon from outside this $r$-subset. We link the time it takes to collect all super-coupons in the $r = s$ case of this model to the cover time of random walk on a certain finite regular graph and conjecture that in general, it takes $\frac{r}{s} \binom{r}{s}^{-1}\binom{n}{s}\log\binom{n}{s}(1 + o(1))$ time on average to collect all super-coupons.
Sebastian Cadavid-Sanchez, Khalil Kacem, Rafael Aparecido Martins Frade
et al.
To study social, economic, and historical questions, researchers in the social sciences and humanities have started to use increasingly large unstructured textual datasets. While recent advances in NLP provide many tools to efficiently process such data, most existing approaches rely on generic solutions whose performance and suitability for domain-specific tasks is not well understood. This work presents an attempt to bridge this domain gap by exploring the use of modern Entity Linking approaches for the enrichment of museum collection data. We collect a dataset comprising of more than 1700 texts annotated with 7,510 mention-entity pairs, evaluate some off-the-shelf solutions in detail using this dataset and finally fine-tune a recent end-to-end EL model on this data. We show that our fine-tuned model significantly outperforms other approaches currently available in this domain and present a proof-of-concept use case of this model. We release our dataset and our best model.
This article contextualizes and identifies the influences that led to the design of the Sala Chineza (Chinese Room) (c. 1865) at Ajuda Palace in Lisbon. The study is based on archival sources and bibliography, complemented with a comparative analysis of contemporary examples. The article concludes that the Sala Chineza creation comes from the palatial tradition of this type of themed rooms for the exhibition of valuable oriental pieces. Its total fabric covering simulates a tent, but the way in which it was applied coincided with the custom to fully cover the interior spaces. The arrangement of furniture and decorative pieces was a way of perpetuating the diplomatic offers sent in 1862 and 1864 by the then Shogun from Japan to the King of Portugal, characteristics that contribute to the uniqueness and originality of the Sala Chineza. According to the research findings, it seems to be the only example in which this happened and coincides chronologically with the opening of Japan to the Western world in the mid-19th century, which gave rise to a series of agreements and diplomatic visits to various western countries. The historical contextualization carried out contributes to build knowledge around this Chinese Room, thus contributing to base future museography interventions.
El objetivo es comprender la Gestión, ideología y cultura en los festivales de cine ambiental latinoamericanos. Por ello, la investigación se enmarca dentro del paradigma cualitativo (fenomenología hermenéutica). Se han elegido tres festivales de cine ambiental (4 actores) quienes participan en las entrevistas en profundidad, entre ellos: Festival Internacional de Cine y Medio Ambiente de México- Cinema Planeta), Festival Internacional de Cine y Video Verde de Venezuela y Patagonia Eco Film Fest). La ideología de un festival de cine permite identificar algunos hechos y/o movimientos ambientales que marcan tanto la dirección como la gestión. Son sistemas, formas de expresión, opiniones, ideas y pensamientos aplicados como parte de una historia y cultura (construidos y heredados) desde regiones, países y/o estados. Va más allá de dar una explicación. Busca conocer y comprender algunos misterios del proceso histórico-cultural (pasado, presente y futuro).
Museums. Collectors and collecting, Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology
Ana Paula de Oliveira Villalobos, Ricardo Veloso Fontoura
A pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar a ferramenta de Inteligência Artificial SmartJud do Processo Judicial Eletrônico do Tribunal de Justiça do Estado da Bahia. Em termos da metodologia, trata-se de um estudo de caso e de uma pesquisa documental, em relação aos objetivos é caracterizada como exploratório-descritiva, a coleta de dados foi realizada na base de dados da ferramenta de Chatbot, bem como através de entrevistas com os gestores e técnicos responsáveis pelo desenvolvimento da ferramenta. Como resultado foi observada a média anual de 66% de chamados resolvidos pelo SmartJud PJe para o ano de 2018, e evidenciada a utilização de conceitos na interface entre a Ciência da Informação e a Inteligência Artificial relacionados à gestão informacional. Pode-se concluir que, através da inclusão da funcionalidade do Chatbot, foi possível identificar a ampliação do atendimento às demandas informacionais através do sistema com a consequente redução de atendimento via Service Desk, movimentação de pessoal para atendimento de outros tipos de chamados, e redução de custos.
Diplomatics. Archives. Seals, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
In the classical coupon collector's problem, every box of breakfast cereal contains one coupon from a collection of n distinct coupons, each equally likely to appear. The goal is to find the expected number of boxes a player needs to purchase to complete the whole collection. In this work, we extend the classical problem to k players who compete with one another to be the first to collect the whole collection. We find the expected numbers of boxes required for the slowest and fastest players to finish the game. The odds of a particular player being the slowest or fastest player will also be touched upon. The solutions will be discussed from both the tractable algebraic techniques as well as the probability point of views.
From the 1950’s onward, the myriad qualities of all plastic objects were praised without a second thought. This enthusiasm significantly delayed the awareness of their enormous impact and it took almost half a century to consider these objects a part of post-war culture. This essay aims to sketch the history of the appreciation of the relevance of plastics in the museum world, specifically as a part of design heritage, seen from the viewpoint of the collector and the conservator-restorer. The case of the Design Museum Brussels, established in 2015, shows how a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach on conservation can be developed to the benefit of our plastics heritage.
This article offers the first findings of a broader research about the functioning and configuration of the cultural policy in Nuevo Leon, Mexico. Specifically, it analyzes the case of the Council for Culture and the Arts (Conarte), the only local cultural council that incorporates a shared management between government and civil society. The study responds to a scientific concern to decentralize and regionalize research on cultural policies in Mexico. First, an analysis of Conarte's historical background is made in order to proceed to the study of its creation and first six years of operation (1995-2001). The findings allow to characterize Nuevo Leon's cultural policy model as sui generis, as it presents features typical of the participatory institutions, but also of centralized and arm's lenght models. The methodology employed includes: archival analysis, in-depth interviews and a review of hemerographic sources.
Museums. Collectors and collecting, Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology
Duas pinturas a óleo sobre tela com o mesmo título iconográfico, Auto-retrato tangendo uma espineta, uma da autoria de Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1535-1625), ca. 1556-57, e outra de Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614), 1577, da exposição temporária História de duas pintoras: Sofonisba e Lavinia decorrida no Museo del Prado entre Outubro de 2019 e Fevereiro de 2020 servem de mote à presente nota de investigação. Apesar dos valiosos estudos e dados laboratoriais dados à estampa, notámos a ausência de menção à música. Partindo dos dois auto-retratos em apreço, procuraremos responder às seguintes questões: Qual a relevância da música na educação da mulher na segunda metade do século XVI, em Itália? Qual a forma e a função da espineta? Qual o significado de um auto-retrato como mulher e música?
Arts in general, Museums. Collectors and collecting
This work establishes a closed-form analysis for two-dimensional transient heat transfer in an absorber plate based on the thermal wave model when the collector starts to work. The method of separation of variables is employed to determine the exact thermal response during the starting of a solar collector. The thermal field is represented by 2-D thermal contours and 3-D surface plots to provide an accurate prediction compared to the 1-D analysis using the time-lag theory. An influence of Fourier number on the heat flow in the absorber plate is studied for different thermal relaxation times. The present analysis highlights that the magnitude of plate temperature depends significantly on the physical geometry. Differences in two models of heat propagation, viz. classical and thermal wave, in the absorber plate have an alteration in predicted collector performances. The present study also develops another design situation for heat transfer in the absorber plate when the collector shutdowns to the ambient state from its steady condition. Laplace Transform Method (LTM) in combination with the product solution method uses to determine the temperature with the initial condition represented as a steady case. Due to the lagging nature of thermal behavior, a significant difference between the classical and thermal wave models for the propagation of heat was observed, and also this study determines the exact time to be taken to reach the dead state for the complete shutdown of the collector.
Individual tracking of museum visitors based on portable radio beacons, an asset for behavioural analyses and comfort/performance improvements, is seeing increasing diffusion. Conceptually, this approach enables room-level localisation based on a network of small antennas (thus, without invasive modification of the existent structures). The antennas measure the intensity (RSSi) of self-advertising signals broadcasted by beacons individually assigned to the visitors. The signal intensity provides a proxy for the distance to the antennas and thus indicative positioning. However, RSSi signals are well-known to be noisy, even in ideal conditions (high antenna density, absence of obstacles, absence of crowd, ...). In this contribution, we present a method to perform accurate RSSi-based visitor tracking when the density of antennas is relatively low, e.g. due to technical constraints imposed by historic buildings. We combine an ensemble of "simple" localisers, trained based on ground-truth, with an encoding of the museum topology in terms of a total-coloured graph. This turns the localisation problem into a cascade process, from large to small scales, in space and in time. Our use case is visitors tracking in Galleria Borghese, Rome (Italy), for which our method manages >96% localisation accuracy, significantly improving on our previous work (J. Comput. Sci. 101357, 2021).
Katrin Glinka, Patrick Tobias Fischer, Claudia Müller-Birn
et al.
We present an exploratory case study describing the design and realisation of a ''pure mixed reality'' application in a museum setting, where we investigate the potential of using Microsoft's HoloLens for object-centred museum mediation. Our prototype supports non-expert visitors observing a sculpture by offering interpretation that is linked to visual properties of the museum object. The design and development of our research prototype is based on a two-stage visitor observation study and a formative study we conducted prior to the design of the application. We present a summary of our findings from these studies and explain how they have influenced our user-centred content creation and the interaction design of our prototype. We are specifically interested in investigating to what extent different constructs of initiative influence the learning and user experience. Thus, we detail three modes of activity that we realised in our prototype. Our case study is informed by research in the area of human-computer interaction, the humanities and museum practice. Accordingly, we discuss core concepts, such as gaze-based interaction, object-centred learning, presence, and modes of activity and guidance with a transdisciplinary perspective.