- Presented for the first time at Art Center Nabi’s ‘Party in a Box’ festival
- Proposal of a friend-like AI that breaks away from the existing rigid representation of AI

▲ Seoul National University’s Autonomous Robot Intelligence Laboratory + Art Center Nabi <#GennieChallenge>
 
Seoul National University's College of Engineering (Dean Byoungho Lee) announced on November 19 (Friday) that the Autonomous Robot Intelligence Laboratory (Professor Seong-Woo Kim) will unveil AI "Gennie" and the AI project "#GennieChallenge" that was jointly researched and developed with Art Center Nabi (Director Soh Yeong Roh).
 
This project applied multimodal embedding artificial intelligence technology, and proceeded with the support of the 2020 Cultural Technology R&D Support Project 'Cultural Contents R&D Professional Training - Art and Science Convergence Project' of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency.
 
From November 19 onwards, it will be open through its online website at all times and from November 19 to 21, AI 'Gennie' and the AI project '#GennieChallenge' will be showcased to the public for the first time at the "Party in a Box" festival on the fourth floor of SK Seorin Building in Jongno-gu, Seoul.
 
The storytelling is such that in a hypothetical situation where a single panel is missing from a four-paneled cartoon drawn by authors, the sketch is completed with the friendly AI "Gennie",  breaking away from the stereotype of AI creation that is rigid and strict. Public participation is also induced in the form of a web-based challenge, <#GennieChallenge>
 
In addition, the AI "Gennie" recommends a sketch using vast amounts of information that is input by users who access the website. In order to build data, information regarding 200,000 major scenes was extracted from 10,000 movies using the AI, having the main composition, character placement, and background to be sketched. When a user who accesses the website enters sentences such as those regarding plot or cartoon lines, Gennie proposes an appropriate sketch, while multimodal embedding technology was used in this process. This is a technology that enables conversion and translation between sentences and images by mapping sentences and images to the same vector space, allowing users to access images that are the most closely relevant to the sentences they enter.
 
The results of the participants that were made with AI Gennie's help on the site of the festival or through the website can be shared with other participants by using social media, with hashtags. In addition, famous illustrators ooo and Liru who are active in various fields such as music videos and advertisements and have a total of 210,000 social network followers will participate on the 25th to complete the artwork with AI Gennie and the audience. Art Center Nabi plans to produce and distribute brochures containing outstanding works among the artworks of the illustration and the challenge participants.
 
Under the virtuous cycle structure where culture and art provide goals for technology while new technologies provide inspiration, Art Center Nabi and researchers from Seoul National University's College of Engineering worked closely from the beginning through the entire process. Based on the fact that it usually takes great amount of time for creators to get inspiration and draw their first sketch, AI-based creative scaffolding was proposed and demonstrated to help them. The joint research team of Art Center Nabi and Seoul National University's College of Engineering will continue their joint research to expand their technology for its use in various content areas such as webtoons, movies, and web novel production scenarios.
 
In addition, the joint research team published more than 13 papers on the developed technology at the world's best international academic journals and major academic conferences, and patented a number of related technologies such as "sentence-based sketch recommendation system and method" and "continuous image search system using graphic similarity."
 
Meanwhile, Director Soh Yeong Roh, who is also a visiting professor at Seoul National University's Graduate School of Engineering, said, "With the help of the Korea Creative Content Agency, the field of engineering student and art have converged to create surprising results. It was an opportunity to learn from each other's fields, exchange opinions, and create true professional convergence." Meanwhile, Professor Seong-Woo Kim said, "We plan to continue cooperating with each other. We look forward to expanding AI technology into various fields of creation."