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TARBOOT Digital Culture & Heritage Contest Winners
Sallai Meridor
Photo: Yonathan Boger
Three proposals were each awarded $50,000 of a potential $3 million at the finals of TARBOOT, the technological innovation contest for expanding digital use of heritage and cultural content.
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL, November 29, 2022 – Yad Hanadiv (A Rothschild Family Foundation) and the National Library of Israel (NLI) are proud to announce the winners of TARBOOT, the international technological innovation competition for expanding digital use of heritage and culture content. The winners were announced at a ceremony held last night at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, in the presence of Hannah Rothschild CBE, Chair of Yad Hanadiv, and Sallai Meridor, Chairman of the National Library of Israel.
Almost one year ago, a call went out to innovators, asking for groundbreaking ideas to expand the use of digital heritage and cultural content, based on NLI collections. These treasures include significant handwritten works by luminaries such as Maimonides and Sir Isaac Newton, exquisite Islamic manuscripts dating back to the ninth century and the personal archives of leading cultural and intellectual figures including Martin Buber, Natan Sharansky and Naomi Shemer. NLI also holds the world's largest collections of textual Judaica, Jewish and Israeli music, maps of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, as well as world-class collections of manuscripts, ancient maps, rare books, photographs, communal and personal archival materials, and more.
The TARBOOT competition was launched to encourage innovation and develop solutions to technological challenges that would enable widespread digital dissemination of cultural and heritage treasures. This aligns with NLI's mission of being the Library of the Jewish people, the State of Israel for all its citizens, and the Land of Israel and its region throughout the ages, and with its central values of democratizing knowledge, and opening its collections and resources to as broad an audience as possible.
Over 400 submissions were received, of which 22 semi-finalists, and 7 finalists were selected by a jury consisting of key figures in the digital and cultural realms.
The top three selected proposals were awarded a cash prize of $50,000 each. Of these projects, up to $3 million may be allocated for their realization and implementation.
- General Track Winner: The Time Machine – A technology to ingest information from NLI, Wikipedia and other archives, and present it in a unique "timeline" format, making it easier to see these materials in their historical context.
- Start-up Track Winner: ASAT (As Simple As That) – ASAT natural language processing (NLP) and text processing technology reduces the complexity of content (video, audio, websites) automatically, while preserving its meaning and information content so as to make all content clear to all people.
- Student Track Winner: Billions of Words – Developing NLI's image search by applying AI technology to create a smart, easy way to search the rich visual archives (photos, posters, maps) to improve archive accessibility.
Hannah Rothschild CBE, Chair of Yad Hanadiv and jury member, said, "The outpouring of interest in the competition was incredibly heartwarming and demonstrated to us at Yad Hanadiv, to the wonderful staff of the Library, and to everyone watching, how many people share the mission of the National Library to make history and culture a part of everyday life."
Sallai Meridor, Chairman of the National Library of Israel, said, "In recent years, as part of the Library's renewal process, we have made many efforts to increase the use of the cultural and heritage treasures of the State of Israel, the Jewish people, and the Islam and the Middle East collections, and make them accessible to the general public. This includes cooperation between the Library with advanced, ground-breaking technological initiatives to realize these goals. Thanks to the cooperation, and significant, generous contribution of Yad Hanadiv to the renewal of the National Library of Israel, and thanks to this competition, we will now be able to make available to the local and global public – through advanced and innovative platforms and tools – the millions of photos, texts, music, newspapers, posters and more from the Library's collections. We are also very proud of the important relationship formed between the younger generation, and technology and high-tech community as regards the Library's content and goals. In this connection - between treasures of the past and present, and the fresh talents of the present and the future - lies great hope for Israel and the National Library of Israel."
TARBOOT is an initiative of Yad Hanadiv together with the National Library of Israel. Competition technology partners include major Israeli companies Cybereason, Gong, Lightricks, MyHeritage, and OpenWeb.
The judges panel comprised Hannah Rothschild CBE, Chair of the Board of Trustees of Yad Hanadiv (A Rothschild Foundation); Chemi Peres, Managing Partner & Co-Founder of Pitango VC and Chair of The Peres Center for Peace & Innovation; Professor Sam Wineburg of Stanford University; Lila Tretikov, Deputy CTO and VP at Microsoft; Noam Nisan, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University; Rabbi Shai Piron, former Minister of Education and Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, and President of the Pnima movement; Hussein Agha, Senior Associate Member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford; Adi Aron-Gilat, Head of Strategy at X (formerly Google X), Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory in Israel; poet and author Sami Shalom Chetrit, Professor and Dean of the Sapir College School of Audio & Visual Arts; Michael Lynton, Chair of Snap Inc. and former CEO of Sony Entertainment; Noa Menhaim, Editor-in-Chief of the Hebrew Literature Department at Kinneret Zmora Dvir Publishing House; Avishay Ovadia, Founding Partner at VC fund Collider.
