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The World Economic Forum's annual list of this year's breakthrough technologies, published today, includes "socially aware" open AI. As technology for AI assistants expands, imagine that you could walk up to a display in a museum and ask a custom AI assistant any question you like about what you are seeing. Siri and Cortana and Google Assistant and Amazon Echo try to answer questions on all topics, but what if museums and other organizations could build their own add-on packs for their sphere of knowledge? The Getty, for example, would prepare answers to every question they've ever heard about "Statue of a Victorious Youth" and museum visitors (or maybe anybody in the world) could use the add-on pack to find out what they want to know.

This is a MUST read about why museum professional need to think bigger -- much, much bigger -- about the future. "The dark matter of the Internet is open, social, peer-to-peer and read/write--and it's the future of museums." Michael Edson hits the nail on the head.

Final evaluation of retrofit using LED lamps in track lighting for photography exhibit at Getty Museum finds cost savings and deterioration no worse than filtered halogen lamps for equivalent exposure

Increased accessibility through robotics to museums and countless other places is no longer a dream of the future, it's a reality in many large institutions. The challenge now is to translate these advances for use by the masses.

For those of you who don't subscribe to Nina Simon's blog, I thought that what she's saying is important for all of us.

I went to this great open house yesterday on campus, "Robot Block Party." Everything from the Nasa robotics team to amateur tinkerers frankensteining robots in their backyards. A couple people from the Exhibits team at the Cal Academy showed a kinect-powered robot they had been tinkering with as a side project, where - their idea - would be to put the robot (with a camera) on the roof, and you'd be able to "drive" it using the kinect inside the museum. And of course, there was the self-driving race car, complete with the ubiquitous Stanford parking sticker.

Another great example of a museum serving visitors with autism.

Is their wisdom in the crowd? 

Trello

Do museums have a role in dying language preservation?  Can we use technology to do so?  What are the dying languages in your community?

Another page for the COST Web site with a link to Foresight 2030 reports, including the overall summary report. While not museum-specific, there is much to ponder broadly relative to technology, innovation and changing conditions in the world.