Information on the history of architecture is embedded in our daily surroundings, in vernacular and heritage buildings and in physical objects, photographs and plans. Historians study these tangible and intangible artefacts and the communities that built and used them. Thus valuable insights are gained into the past and the present as they also provide a foundation for designing the future. Given that our understanding of the past is limited by the inadequate availability of data, the article demonstrates that advanced computer tools can help gain more and well-linked data from the past. Computer vision can make a decisive contribution to the identification of image content in historical photographs. This application is particularly interesting for architectural history, where visual sources play an essential role in understanding the built environment of the past, yet lack of reliable metadata often hinders the use of materials. The automated recognition contributes to making a variety of image sources usable for research.

@en

Hybrid Intelligence (HI) is the combination of human and machine intelligence, expanding human intellect instead of replacing it. Information in HI scenarios is often inconsistent, e.g. due to shifting preferences, user's motivation or conflicts arising from merged data. As it provides an intuitive mechanism for reasoning with conflicting information, with natural explanations that are understandable to humans, our hypothesis is that Dung's Abstract Argumentation (AA) is a suitable formalism for such hybrid scenarios. This paper investigates the capabilities of Argumentation in representing and reasoning in the presence of inconsistency, and its potential for intuitive explainability to link between artificial and human actors. To this end, we conduct a survey among a number of research projects of the Hybrid Intelligence Centre. Within these projects we analyse the applicability of argumentation with respect to various inconsistency types stemming, for instance, from commonsense reasoning, decision making, and negotiation. The results show that 14 out of the 21 projects have to deal with inconsistent information. In half of those scenarios, the knowledge models come with natural preference relations over the information. We show that Argumentation is a suitable framework to model the specific knowledge in 10 out of 14 projects, thus indicating the potential of Abstract Argumentation for transparently dealing with inconsistencies in Hybrid Intelligence systems.@en

The ArchiMediaL project aims to bridge between data science and researches on contemporary and historical built environments by developing state of the art AI algorithms for the automatic linking of available meta-data and image repositories. As a case-study we use the 360,000+ historical images from the Amsterdam Beeldbank database.@en

Built form dominates the urban space where most people live and work and provides a visual reflection of the local, regional and global esthetical, social, cultural, technological and economic factors and values. Street-view images and historical photo archives are therefore an invaluable source for sociological or historical study; however, they often lack metadata to start any comparative analysis. Date and location are two basic annotations often missing from historical images. Depending on the research question other annotations might be useful, that either could be visually derived (e.g. the number or age of cars, the fashion people wear, the amount of street decay) or extracted from other data sources (e.g. crime statistics for the neighborhood where the picture was taken). Recent advances in automatic visual analysis and the increasing amount of linked open data triggered the research described in this paper. We provide an overview of the current status of automated image analysis and linked data technology and present a case study and methodology to automatically enrich a large database of historical images of buildings in the city of Amsterdam. @en

We address the interpretability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for predicting a geo-location from an image. In a pilot experiment we classify images of Pittsburgh vs Tokyo and visualize the learned CNN filters. We found that varying the CNN architecture leads to variating in the visualized filters. This calls for further investigation of the effective parameters on the interpretability of CNNs.

@en