Juma Al Majid Center for Culture and Heritage in Dubai and the Arab Administrative Development Organization, affiliated with the League of Arab States, organized a virtual scientific meeting entitled: “From Memory to the Future: Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation in the Service of Heritage.” The meeting featured presentations by Dr. Mohamed Khalif, a consultant in innovation, digital transformation, and artificial intelligence integration, and a member of the Communications and Information Technology Research Council of the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology, and Mr. Abdel-Azim Saqr, a researcher at the Institute of Arab Manuscripts of the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO).
The meeting began with a presentation by Dr. Mohamed Khalif entitled: “Living Heritage: A Strategic Vision for Building a Smart Digital System Based on Partnerships and Innovation.” In his presentation, he explored how to move from digitizing and preserving heritage to building a smart digital system that makes heritage more vibrant, interactive, and sustainable. He also discussed the role of artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and immersive technologies in developing new experiences for learning, exploring, and interacting with heritage.
He also highlighted the importance of partnerships between cultural institutions, universities, technology companies, startups, and creative industries in developing new services and solutions. He discussed the concept of “heritage as a platform,” through which heritage assets can be transformed into a sustainable source of knowledge, innovation, and cultural and economic value.
Following this, MR. Abdel-Azim Saqr spoke about “The Experience of Employing Artificial Intelligence in Classifying and Digitizing Arabic Manuscripts,” based on a vision that considers the manuscript a multidimensional document, combining textual, visual, and physical characteristics. He also addressed the challenges of digitization and reviewed the experience of the cognitive agent for classifying Arabic manuscripts (the Al-Shanti system), which is based on analyzing manuscript characteristics using computer vision technologies and cognitive indicators.
His presentation concluded that the future of manuscript digitization is moving towards intelligent systems that go beyond text extraction to understanding, classifying, and analyzing the manuscript. The meeting was attended by a number of researchers, interested parties and specialists in this field. Many questions were posed to the lecturers, who answered them and enriched the discussion with a range of insights and experiences related to the future of employing artificial intelligence and digital transformation in the service of heritage.
