Experience BUT at Researchers' Night: When Old Documents Speak

We often find history preserved in books, newspapers and manuscripts, but finding a specific piece of information among an endless number of pages can be far from easy. What if artificial intelligence could find a particular article in a hundred-year-old newspaper, recognize a person’s handwriting or even correct a dictation exercise? Visitors to Researchers' Night at the Faculty of Information Technology BUT will discover that this is already possible.

A window into history. This is how machine processing of historical documents could be described. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore how modern technologies can open the door to the past. “Our technologies make it possible to search through the collections of Czech libraries and archives, so you can find out, for example, where the first petrol station in South Moravia was opened,” says Michal Hradiš, head of a group of PhD students who will present the project at Researchers' Night.

Visitors will be able to test how well artificial intelligence can read their handwriting and explore old newspapers, magazines and books. They can use the search tools to find photographs of public figures, illustrations or advertisements, as well as discover what was being written in the Brno newspapers in the first half of the 20th century. The technology thus allows visitors to explore historical materials in a way that would be almost unimaginable when browsing through thousands of pages by hand.

“What I enjoy is connecting advanced technologies with the humanities,” explains Hradiš, who in recent years has focused together with his team primarily on making historical documents accessible using modern AI methods. He also researches how to teach computers to understand images and documents and is the lead developer of the PERO OCR system, which helps libraries and archives automatically transcribe both printed and handwritten texts.

Researchers' Night takes place on Friday, 25 September, and all BUT faculties and units will take part. Laboratories, classrooms and research facilities will open their doors to the public and offer a programme full of experiments, interactive demonstrations and opportunities to meet researchers. More information can be found on the Researchers' Night website. Come and discover how the technologies that shape your everyday life are created – and experience BUT!

Author: Lenka Hubáčková

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