AI4Museums

Tourism is one of Italy’s most important economic sectors. Part of the reason for this is that thanks to the “Bel Paese’s” historic heritage, Italy offers one of the largest and most diverse set of cultural attractions: castles, churches, monasteries, museums, and other numerous landmarks. The Covid-19 pandemic caused a major setback for the cultural sector as a whole, and we believe private and public actors could significantly help during the recovery. Our main goal is to develop a multidisciplinary approach for managing museums for the city of Turin. The plan is to introduce data-driven methods to help museums organize and improve their business. On the one hand, we are going to develop pricing strategies that would allow museums to have a steadier and a more predictable flow of visitors. We are planning to develop forecasting models aimed at helping museums predict visitor flows. This has obvious advantages in planning their staffing needs and pricing strategies. On top of generating more advanced pricing strategies we plan to use a museum app, called I-Muse, to gather additional information about visitor preferences. I-Muse will also allow visitors to have virtual tours of the participating museums and, with their help, use experimental methods to understand whether such digital content acts as a substitute for or complements of physical tours. The project is funded by the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, and it involves the Economics and Management Departments of the University of Turin, the Informatics and Architecture Departments of the Politecnico, the digital experience company Synesthesia and seven museums of Turin, namely "Museo del Cinema", "La Venaria Reale", "Pinacoteca Agnelli", "MAO - Museo dell'Arte Orientale", "MAUTO - Museo dell'Auto" and "GAM - Galleria d'Arte Moderna".