Saving heritage with smart tech

The motifs created by Zhao Haiying's team are derived from the murals in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. [Photo/China Daily]

As director of the university's key laboratory of cultural intelligence computing, she leads a team merging AI, big data and archaeology to build what she calls a "digital gene bank of Chinese civilization".

Through multimodal AI and computing technologies, cultural symbols can be structurally analyzed and semantically linked to establish a digital foundation for theoretical interpretation, according to her.

For Zhao, the breakthrough began with a fundamental question: Can culture be computed?

"A cultural gene must be stable enough to inherit, yet dynamic enough to evolve and recombine, like biological DNA," she explains, adding that this unit could be a pattern, a color or a craft technique.