Museum Studies MA Program's Speaker Series - "Everything that is Wrong in Museums Starts with Wall Labels: Machine Learning and AI in Museums."

The Museum Studies MA Program is proud to present a lecture on AI and its complicated relationship with the museum field: "Everything that is Wrong in Museums Starts with Wall Labels: Machine Learning and AI in Museums"

It is difficult to separate the issues and questions that contemporary machine-learning and “artificial intelligence” technologies raise in the context of museums without addressing the long history of past attempts to make collections “digital”  and how those efforts have played out organizationally over the years. So many of those issues end up being made manifest in the challenges surrounding the production of wall labels and this talk will discuss some inconvenient truths (and opportunities) about museums and computing that AI surfaces.

Aaron Straup Cope is currently Head of Internet Typing at the San Francisco International Airport Museum. Previous gigs included serving as Head of Engineering at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, where he was responsible for the architecture and implementation of the museum's digital infrastructure, and serving as Senior Engineer at Flickr, where he focused on all things geo, machinetag and galleries related.