Artificial intelligence (AI) is the topic of this year’s exhibition on the “MS Wissenschaft”, a science freighter created in an initiative of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Intelligent analysis of big data volumes and the interaction of man and machine are just two of the many facets of AI. These problems were tackled by Mediasphere For Nature, the multimedia application lab of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, together with the SnailSnap team of the Coding da Vinci hackathon who developed an app that turns selfies into mosaics of snail shells.
The AI helped to analyze thousands of photos of snail cases from the museum’s collection. The shells had to be classified, cut out and sorted by color, shape and size. The exhibit on the “MS Wissenschaft” turns a selfie into a mosaic after scanning the image, determining the color of each image point and replacing it with matching snail shells. By clicking on each shell, the user gets additional information about the species as well as the date and location of its finding.
You can visit the “MS Wissenschaft” in Berlin from the 16th-19th of May. Afterwards the ship continues its journey through Germany and Austria: https://ms-wissenschaft.de/
More about the SnailSnap App: https://mediasphere.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/blog/