The Henry Ford's AI Connections Table

Client: The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation
Studio: Bluecadet
Role: Developer, AI curation system
Technologies: Cinder, EntityX, Tensorflow, scikit-learn, SQLite
Awards: Anthem Awards, silver winner in Education, Art, & Culture, silver winner in Responsible Technology

The Henry Ford of Museum American Innovation wanted to give guests a peek into the sometimes messy, always interesting mind of a museum curator. The AI Connections Table marries curator-created concepts with surprising AI-driven discoveries, illuminating connections between over 30,000 objects across the museum's digital collection.

The work began with the museum curators who made 2,000+ connections between objects organized by 80+ topics. Bluecadet then employed an AI to find new and unexpected connections. Finally, we combined the curator-led and AI insights into a single explorable web of interconnected objects.

We used a pre-trained deep learning model (VGG16) to analyze every image to get the model's internal representation of this image (technically called latent representation, in the form of an array of numbers). With this information we could find the location of every object in the "THF universe" (technically, latent space).

For any two objects in this universe, we can create a visual similarity path by selecting a series of objects between them. This gives us the capability to connect any two objects from the THF collection.

Besides the visual similarity approach, we also analyzed the dominant color of all the objects, so that we can create paths of objects with gradually changing colors.

We optimized the AI curation system for real-time application, and built the interactive app following the Entity Component System (ECS) paradigm to ensure smooth performance with hundreds of interactive objects on screen. The result is a powerful, intuitive, and surprisingly fun multi-user experience. With a single swipe, visitors can discover an infinite chain of connected objects.

As The Henry Ford's digital collection grows, so do connections on the Table. We integrated the Table with the museum's collection management software, so it always up-to-date with the latest artifacts and connections once they are digitized.