New Exhibit & Website Harness the Power of AI

Use controls above or click here to open this Hometown Heroes podcast in a new window
Episode #842 of Hometown Heroes, airing June 15-20, 2024, introduces us to The Thread of Memory, a new initiative that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to put D-Day and the invasion of Normandy in newfound perspective, through a temporary in-person exhibit, as well as a permanent interactive website. Watch the brief video below for a sneak peek at what The Thread of Memory is all about:

“The idea for us was to use AI to help reconstruct some of the memories of what happened during D-Day,” you’ll hear from Juan Lavista Ferres, Chief Data Scientist for Microsoft. “This type of technology can be used for multiple other scenarios and we are exploring some of those scenarios too with some museums and other organizations.”

Visitors explore The Thread of Memory exhibit in Normandy (photo by Microsoft France)

The volume and variety of information on The Thread of Memory website is enough to keep a visitor occupied for days, and accessible anywhere, anytime. While the Operation Overlord installation debuted in conjunction with the 80th anniversary of D-Day, similar exhibits will be open to the public in France in time to coincide with the respective 80th anniversaries of:

Operation Dragoon – the invasion of Southern France (Provence) – August 15 – September 14, 2024

Liberation of Paris – August 19-25, 2024

Lavista Ferres, who also heads Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, says his participation in the project was an eye-opening experience, and he was struck by the quantity of historical data from World War II that has yet to be digitized. The algorithmic mechanisms employed in The Thread of Memory could be a tool used to chip away at that deficit.

“There’s still a lot of information that is living in these locations but is not open to the world,” you’ll hear Lavista Ferres say. “Hopefully, using this technology, (we can) make it easier for people to consume it.”

The Thread of Memory website features multiple avenues of historical exploration.

In addition for extensive collections of photographs, maps, and chronological battle timelines, the site features audio narration culled from written memoirs of D-Day survivors from multiple Allied countries, including 101st Airborne Division veteran Tom Rice, who first shared his story with our Hometown Heroes audience in 2015.

“I think it’s important to remember the amount of effort that took,” you’ll hear Lavista Ferres say of the motivation behind this new method of detailing the Allies’ defeat of the Nazi regime. “We live in a world like this today thanks to people that gave their life to these events.”

D-Day paratrooper Tom Rice on the day he shared his story with Hometown Heroes in 2015.

Tom Rice passed away at age 101 in 2022, but the Purple Heart paratrooper had a special way of honoring those who did not survive “The Longest Day.” He took pride in his final decade on the planet in marking every D-Day anniversary by once again jumping out of an airplane and parachuting to the ground. Those were all tandem jumps, and all went much more smoothly than his Normandy descent behind enemy lines. Watch the video below from CBS News to see how Rice marked the 75th anniversary of D-Day in 2019:

This episode of Hometown Heroes features some of Rice’s recollections of June 6th, 1944, with a moment-by-moment vivid description of the historic jump that he and more than 13,000 other paratroopers made in the dark of night, followed by the unexpected twists and turns he endured over the course of that “Longest Day.”

—Paul Loeffler