museum technology teams

Abstract: Urban heritage tours are often delivered through fixed scripts, leaving limited room for visitors' situated questions, language preferences, or requests for evidence. We present ECHOES, an adaptive LLM-powered AR glasses docent for evidence-grounded interpretation of historical buildings. Specifically, the agent adapts along three dimensions: it modifies response structure according to the type of visitor question (identification, architectural detail, evidence-seeking, or route inquiry); it accumulates session-level interest signals from repeated questions and expressed curiosity to shape later explanations; and it tracks language preference and retrieval context across turns to maintain conversational continuity. The core of ECHOES is an LLM agent initialized as a source-aware urban heritage docent that realizes this adaptation through dialogue and preference context maintained across the session. Around this agent, ECHOES integrates visual site grounding, a self-built historical knowledge base supporting retrieval-augmented generation, and concise multilingual AR output designed for glanceable use. Through a working prototype centered on Shanghai's East Nanjing Road and the Bund, we demonstrate how an adaptive LLM-powered AR docent can transform historical tours from scripted narration into situated, question-responsive, and source-aware conversations.

Abstract: The need for collaboration between diverse fields of research is increasingly recognised as important by research funding agencies. A significant driver of this need is the current revolution in artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies. There is a growing interest in the potential impact of AI in different fields including the methodologies they use and the resulting advances in new knowledge, new access and enhanced productivity. However, there is also a corresponding increase in concern about the fundamentals of AI technologies and the way in which trans and/or interdisciplinary research is approached. The resulting collaboration too often ends up as a one-way street where the domain partner acts only as an information provider. For example, the contribution of the AHSS partner might be limited to providing insight about ethics and/or the technology partner may only provide a service to build applied AI-based solutions. In response to this problem, we propose a reciprocal approach to collaboration where both partners seek to understand, cooperate and identify jointly significant impacts. In this paper we explore this relationship between cultural heritage institutions (GLAMs), Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences (AHSS) research and technology-led AI research, especially the impact of current technological advances in AI. Drawing from the history of convergence in GLAM studies, we propose five key practices to form a framework for greater understanding across this divide.