Introducing Emma! Artfinder’s AI curator

14th November 2016 Download PDF 

• Meet Artfinder’s new AI curator Emma - she’s a Twitter Bot powered by Artfinder’s new visual search technology
• She returns up to 200 artworks inspired by any image you tweet at her - an artwork, a selfie, a famous landmark

Art marketplace Artfinder this week launches ‘Emma’ - it’s new digital curator.

Powered by facial recognition technology (used by police to recognize faces from CCTV footage), Emma responds to images tweeted at her, with up to 200 artworks inspired by the original image from Artfinder catalogue of 250,000+ artworks.

Emma is powered by visual search technology, which is also implemented on the site as a ‘more like this’ feature, built on Artfinder’s proprietary DVS (deep visual search) technology. DVS uses LIRE in a framework that can derive similarities between artworks that go beyond traditional visual attribution (such as sunset matches sunset, or impressionist style matches impressionistic style), looking at the deeper visual structures that evoke a human reaction, and then find other artworks that evoke a similar response.

Artfinder’s search is powered by Elasticsearch, which is part of the Elastic Stack, the world's most popular set of open source technologies for search, logging, and analytics. Elasticsearch is augmented to utilize LIRE, and the image descriptors in use include FCTH Comparison (Fuzzy Colour and Texture Histogram), CEDD Comparison (Colour and Edge Directivity Descriptor), JCD Comparison (Joint Composite Descriptor).

The first site in the art space to deliver automatic art similarity detection, Artfinder is a new way of shopping for art. In a traditionally curator-led, advisory market, personalised recommendations based on individual users’ tastes mark a new era for online art buying.

Artfinder’s CEO, Swedish entrepreneur Jonas Almgren, comments:
“Through Emma and her related technology we believe we have cracked the two biggest problems in art e-commerce. Firstly, that users don’t know how to describe what they want - text search is no use for a visual medium, and that secondly, when selling original artwork – what do you do when the one you want has already sold? “Also, the rate at which art is being added to Artfinder is staggering, which is why we’ve realised that recommendations are key. Around 1000 new artworks are currently being added to the site every single day, so even if you’re refreshing our ‘new’ page every hour, there’s lots of great stuff you’re going to miss.” The search results will be boosted by the site’s personalised recommendations driver, providing recommendations that are totally unique to you, as well as new artworks from artists that you follow. Artfinder’s personalised recommendations are driven by a combination of population-based collaborative-filtering algorithms and Neo Technology’s graph database software, Neo4j.

Artfinder is the global marketplace for original, affordable art - currently connecting 8,000 artists in 103 countries with 500,000 subscribers around the world.

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For further press information and images please contact Jane Verity on jane.verity@artfinder.com or +44(0) 203 637 4235.

Notes to Editors:

About Artfinder

Artfinder is the art marketplace.

We’re on a mission to create a world where everyone owns art. A world where independent artists can make a living doing what they love.

Founded in March 2013 and based in London and Miami, Artfinder connects people to artists and art. For all tastes, all budgets, all styles. From everywhere and for everyone. And every single piece signed by the artist.

The site is growing fast, currently connecting 500,000 subscribers around the world with:

• 8,000 artists and galleries internationally
• 250,000+ artworks in categories including painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, drawing and collage