Traveling in time has always been a dream of mankind. Imagine being able to experience ancient Rome first hand or to move back to the days of our ancestors to experience how people were living at that time. Obviously, such time travel goes well beyond our physical limitations of today.

Still, despite the impossibility of real-time travel, a consortium of more than 250 European research institutions from 32 countries is planning to build a virtual Time Machine. This Time Machine is meant to be a large database that can store, interpret, and connect various kinds of historical information ranging from text and images over maps and 3D models to music and other sensory information. The role of the Time Machine is then to link all this information and to reconstruct plausible views into the past. Finally, it should allow us to navigate all these data to move in time and space as easily as we do on the Internet today.

Imagine which AI methods one could train on 5000 years of European history with the support of citizen scientists across the whole world to help with data annotation. If you are interested in the project, the European Time Machine is still actively recruiting new members on their website.