Singapore possesses a treasure trove of art and history material which visitors find challenging to discover on their own. For cultural institutions like National Gallery Singapore, expert-lead docent tours represent the most popular way for a visitor to experience the artistic treasures on exhibition. With over 1.5 million people visiting National Gallery every year, the docent tours often oversubscribed and limited in available time slots, new ways are required for visitors to be guided around art and exhibits.
National Gallery and Institute of Data Science (IDS) will jointly develop an intelligent GalleryBot that is able to assimilate the rich unstructured content about the artworks to interact with the visitors by automatically generating content-rich conversations to interact with the visitors to discover their interests, recommend relevant artworks for their visit, and share with them interesting information about the artworks. With the largest public collection of modern art in Singapore and Southeast Asia reflecting Singapore’s unique heritage and geographical location, the GalleryBot can help the Gallery engage a broad audience from art enthusiasts to non-museum goers, and enrich their visits with data science technologies such as natural language processing.
In future, the GalleryBot can also be further developed for other museums, heritage sites, tourist attractions in Singapore. This would help maximize visitorship, and satisfaction, to cultural institutions and places of interests in Singapore, and enhance better understanding and appreciation of Singapore’s arts, culture and heritage by our citizens and visitors through the innovative use of research and development in data science and artificial intelligence.
Project Title: GalleryBot
Done By: National Gallery Singapore, Institute of Data Science (IDS) and Singapore Data Science Consortium (SDSC)
Contact Person: Prof. Ng See Kiong, Deputy Director, IDS
This research is supported by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Industry Alignment Fund (Pre-positioning) Funding Initiative.