SIGNIFICANCE

Project Title: Stop Illicit heritaGe traffickiNg wIth artiFICiAl iNtelligenCE
Acronym: SIGNIFICANCE
Coordinator: The Cyprus Institute 
Type of funding: European
Funding source: Internal Security Fund Police
Dates: January 2021 - July 2023

Description: SIGNIFICANCE has been specifically designed to help and increase the responsiveness and effectiveness of the public authorities and police corps against the illicit trafficking of cultural goods through Internet channels (i.e., social platforms, web and dark web). To achieve that, SIGNIFICANCE aims to exploit 2D images and textual datasets; High-Performance Computing (HPC); Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Deep Learning (DL); web crawling for the identification of heritage artefacts sold illicitly online. One of the reasons for this increasing importance is the successful adoption of AI and DL methods in fields as image classification where Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) outperform the human level in object recognition and image search.

The SIGNIFICANCE project consortium consists of three applicants: The Cyprus Institute; Universita’ Politecnica delle Marche (Italy), and HYPERTECH S.A. (Greece). A wide list of partnerships involved in the fight against the Illicit trafficking of CH has been sought. Museums, ICOMOS, IFLA Department of Antiquities will act as advisors creating ontologies, allowing access to collections, and disseminate and exploit the SIGNIFICANCE results locally and internationally. EUROPOL, OSCE, and Police corps will contribute to SIGNIFICANCE implementation and evaluation stage, fine-tuning the platform. UNIDROIT will help to frame the legislative aspects once SIGNIFICANCE reaches capacity.

This project builds on the close collaboration between CyI and STARC/APAC Labs with the Cyprus Department of Antiquities and the Cyprus Police to tackle the challenges of Heritage at Risk, and more specifically to use advanced technologies to prevent and monitor against the looting and illegal circulation of antiquities. This partnership was formalized through a Memorandum of Understanding signed on the 13th of November 2019 to strengthen their collaboration on issues of common interest related to the use of digital technologies for the protection of archaeological monuments and sites.