“Machine Learning on Images of Natural History Collections” Workshop

From the 8th to the 10th of September, the workshop “Machine Learning on Images of Natural History Collections” (Cost Action Mobilise - CA17106) was held at the Herbarium of the University of Coimbra, Department of Life Sciences - UC.
A multidisciplinary team of 19 researchers from 7 European countries discussed the application of Machine Learning to extract information contained in Natural History collections. This tool will allow you to obtain data more quickly, but it can also allow you to extract new types of data.
On the first day of the event, there were 11 presentations, 4 of them remotely, on use cases and practical applications. There was a wide range of topics covered, from workflows and accelerating the digitization of collections, to metadata extraction, training datasets and character recognition.
On the second day there was a group discussion to assess the feasibility of Machine Learning strategies in collections. The results were incorporated into the outline of an article on the development of an infrastructure for analyzing collection images.
After a long period of confinement, it was enriching to be able to discuss ideas face to face and share laughter at social events.