Students and researchers from different international academic backgrounds participated in the international XR&AI Summer School 2023 from 17 to 22 July in Matera Italy, working on the topics of Extended Reality and Artificial Intelligence. The school was held in the House of Technology in Matera and was organized with the support of MateraHUB.
In the context of the School, a creative hackathon was organised where young PhD students worked in an interdisciplinary way on web apps re-using open-source codes shared in the ReInherit Digital Hub. In collaboration with particular multidisciplinary experts, apps from the Reinherit Toolkit were co-created, tested and redesigned, working on the codes, user experience, graphical user interface and application scenarios in museum contexts.
In addition to these workshop activities, international speakers and famous experts debated and engaged with students and researchers with different educational content and skills, and from different international countries: the United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia, from Sweden to the Netherlands, from Spain to Italy. The heterogeneous training of the participants covers different disciplines such as Robotics, Serious Games, Artificial Intelligence and Extended Reality, Digital Humanities, Interaction Design and Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies. They lectured on different topics and applications of AI/XR in different contexts including museums and cultural heritage.
Marco Bertini and Paolo Mazzanti from MICC - University of Florence presented a practical lecture on 'Innovative and sustainable approaches for user engagement and digital interaction with cultural heritage'. Adopting a sustainable and user-centred approach, the aim was to share relevant results of the playful approach and user engagement studies conducted within the ReInHerit H2020 research project. Cutting-edge applications based on artificial intelligence developed by the Media Integration and Communication Centre were presented to inspire the students' project proposals. Important local museums were visited to test the apps in these contexts. Experts in the development of AI-based applications in museumswere invited to coach the work of the participants and participate in interviews and talks in the presence of the local community and cultural stakeholders.
The XR&AI Summer School 2023 was realised in collaboration with Casa delle Tecnologie Emergenti (Cte Square), the Ministry of Enterprise and Made in Italy, the Casa delle Tecnologie Emergenti Matera, and with the support of the University of Basilicata, the University of Salento, the Università Politecnica delle Marche, the University of Naples Federico II, the University of Florence (MICC), the CNR-ISPC, Basilicata Creativa, Materahub, the EDIH Heritage Smart Lab, the 'ReInHerit' project (Horizon 2020 programme), XRtech, Deep Reality, the Fund for Development and Cohesion, Geomatics Applications Processing, the Italian Association in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning.
