5th installment of the SUMAC workshop

Call for Papers: SUMAC 2023

Date: 29 October – 03 November 2023 (tba)
Venue: Ottawa (CAN)
Deadline for the Submission of Papers: 24 July 2023

The fifth version of the SUMAC (analySis, Understanding and proMotion of heritAge Contents) workshop, like its predecessors, focuses on analyzing, processing and valorizing all types of data related to cultural heritage, including tangible and intangible heritage. It will be held in conjunction with the 31st ACM Multimedia International Conference in Ottawa, Canada.

Aims and Scope

As stated by UNESCO, cultural heritage provides societies with a wealth of resources inherited from the past, created in the present for the benefit of future generations. Digital heritage data acquired are naturally massive and address a large diversity of modalities (iconography, text, structured referentials, image, video, 3D, music, sensor data). Their processing and promotion put into light several scientific challenges as well as various new use cases that are of topical interest today for the ACM Multimedia community, both for academics and industries. Like in the previous editions, we will strive to value the sharing of knowledge, algorithms and experiments; and also open source software and open data, by encouraging the submission of articles that promote this sharing policy.

Abundant heritage data is available in the most recent years. Older data, that can be called the big data of the past, are mostly locked – they currently remain largely “hidden” from the public, in galleries, libraries, archives, museums or data producers’ infrastructures. Processing heritage data to increase their visibility will act as a game changer and contribute to a large panel of communities, by enabling an outstanding pool of inter-operable data, not only as a service to citizens but also to public or private actors, by challenging the research methods at the crossing of computer science, artificial intelligence and digital humanities.

Call for Papers

The ambition of SUMAC is to bring together researchers and practitioners from different disciplines to share ideas and methods on current trends in the analysis, understanding and promotion of heritage contents. These challenges are reflected in the corresponding sub-fields of machine learning, signal processing, multi-modal techniques and human-machine interaction. The organisers welcome research contributions for the following (but not limited to) topics:

  • Information retrieval for multimedia heritage
  • Automated archaeology and heritage data processing
  • Multi-modal deep learning and time series analysis for heritage data
  • Heritage modelling, visualization, and virtualization
  • Smart digitization and reconstruction of heritage data
  • Open heritage data and bench-marking

The scope of targeted applications is extensive and includes:

  • Analysis, archaeometry of artefacts
  • Diagnosis and monitoring for restoration and preventive conservation
  • Geosciences / Geomatics for cultural heritage
  • Education
  • Smart and sustainable tourism
  • Urban planning
  • Digital Twins

Keynote speakers

Prof. Mario Santana Quintero on Opportunities and Challenges in digitally transforming World Heritage at 50+ years.
Prof. Mario Santana-Quintero, is a professor at the Civil and Environmental Engineering (Carleton University) in Ottawa, Canada. He is also a Carleton immersive Media Studio Lab (CIMS) faculty member. Besides his academic work in Canada, he is a guest professor at the Raymond Lemaire International Centre for Conservation (University of Leuven). Along with his academic activities, he is the past Secretary-General of the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), serves as board member of the World Heritage Interpretation and Presentation Centre under the auspices of UNESCO, and honorary president of the ICOMOS Scientific Committee on Heritage Documentation (CIPA). Furthermore, he has been a Getty Conservation Institute scholar. He has collaborated in several international projects in the field of heritage documentation for The Getty Conservation Institute, UNESCO among others. In recent years he was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Liege (Belgium), and he is a member of the Association of Preservation Technology College of Fellows.

Prof. Victor de Boer on Knowledge Graphs for Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities.
Prof. Victor de Boer is an associate professor (UHD) at the User-Centric Data Science group at the Computer Science department of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). He is also a senior research fellow at Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and act as co-director of the Cultural AI Lab. In his research, he combines (Semantic) Web technologies with Human-Computer Interaction, Knowledge Representation and Information Extraction to tackle research challenges in various domains. These include Cultural Heritage, Digital Humanities and ICT for Development (ICT4D). He is currently involved in the following research projects: (1) InTaVia: making linked cultural heritage and biographical data usable for end-users; (2) Pressing Matter: developing data models to support societal reconciliation with the colonial past and its afterlives; (3) Interconnect: machine learning on IoT and smart energy knowledge graphs; (4) CLARIAH: investigating how to use linked data for connecting Linked media; (5) Hybrid Intelligence: Augmenting Human Intellect; and (6) CARPA: responsible production using crowdsourcing in Africa.

Important Dates

  • Paper submission: 24 July 2023 (AoE)
  • Author acceptance notification: 9 August 2023
  • Camera-Ready: 12 August 2023
  • Workshop: 29 October – 3 November tba

Special Highlights

Best Paper Award: following tradition, SUMAC 2023 will also be awarding a best paper award, accompanied with a certificate and a trophy.

Journal Special Issue: authors of the best papers from SUMAC 2023 will be invited to submit an extended and improved version for consideration for Special Issue on Cultural Heritage in the Springer journal Multimedia Tools and Applications.

For further details, please visit the event page by clicking the orange button below.