Professor Kenderdine Examines the “Anticipatory Museum” Reshaped by AI, Cultural Big Data, and Speculative Futures
22 Dec 2025
Professor Kenderdine shares how AI turns museums into intersections of heritage, science, and future imaginaries.
The inspiring lecture sparks engaging discussion and imagination about how computer science interacts with culture.
Professor Jianliang Xu, Head and Chair Professor of the Department, presents the souvenir to Professor Kenderdine.
On 17 December 2025, the Department welcomed Professor Sarah Irene Brutton Kenderdine, our Visiting Professor, for a Distinguished Lecture entitled “The Anticipatory Museum: AI, Cultural Big Data, and Speculative Futures” focusing on how artificial intelligence is transforming museums, enabling them to merge heritage, science, and future imaginaries.
In the lecture, Professor Kenderdine outlined discriminative AI, which structures cultural knowledge at scale, and generative AI, which enables the co-creation of new cultural forms. She illustrated the concepts through inspiring case studies, demonstrating how computer science enriches and interacts with cultural practices.
Numerous past and forthcoming projects, including initiatives in and beyond Hong Kong, were showcased to illustrate how the museums’ roles are evolving from traditional curation to encompass experimentation and dynamic public engagement. For example, the “Narratives from the Long Tail” project incorporated machine learning to weave narrative coherence across more than 200,000 hours of archival video, while the “Geneva Public Portal to Anticipation” engaged global audiences and created practical pathways for innovation.
These perspectives collectively reposition the museums as both archives and experimental laboratories for cultural foresight—institutions that not only preserve, but also prototype future cultural practices by leveraging computational methods, participatory design, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Professor Kenderdine is a leading researcher in interactive and immersive experiences for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. She is a professor at the École Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, where she heads the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) and acts as curator-at-large of EPFL Pavilions. She is a pioneer of computational museology, a scaffold that unites machine intelligence with data curation, ontology with visualization, and brings together publics and practitioners through embodied, kinaesthetic and interactive interfaces.
