The work, in which students from nine European universities participated, received the ECIU University's Team Impact Award 2026, the UAB's European alliance.
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The project "Analysing Images with Artificial Intelligence (A-EYE)" forms part of the programmes offered at the ECIU University, a European alliance of research-intensive universities of which the UAB is a founding member. Led by Dr Adriana Monroy-Galindo and Dr Òscar Coromina, lecturers in the Department of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), this project focused on applying artificial intelligence to analyse images from the digitised Ràdio Barcelona scripts collection—a key documentary resource for studying the early days of broadcasting in Spain—in collaboration with the UAB's Communication Library and General Newspaper Archives, which houses these materials and was the key partner in enabling the project to take on a concrete dimension. The challenge fostered collaboration between students from the "Artificial Intelligence in Communication" course within the UAB's bachelor's degree in Interactive Communication and students from other European universities.
The UAB Communication Library and General Newspaper Archives is currently carrying out a major project to digitise documents from the Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War. However, they have encountered a critical issue: the process results in the loss of handwritten censorship marks found on radio scripts from the historical collection (1925–1953)—such as crossed-out phrases, annotations, and modifications made by Francoist regime censors. Faced with this challenge, they studied how to make these traces of repression visible again and whether artificial intelligence could help recover these silenced layers of historical and cultural heritage.
A joint project with archivists and researchers
Thanks to this collaboration, students worked with actual documents from the archival collection and, together with archivists and researchers, developed a computer vision-based prototype capable of detecting, classifying, and interpreting these visual traces of repression—a problem researchers had grappled with for over two years without finding a satisfactory solution.
The project aimed to develop solutions to enhance the value, accessibility, and reusability of these historical materials. To this end, two lines of work were established: on the one hand, the detection of censorship marks—such as stamps, annotations, or handwritten amendments from the Franco era—which are often difficult to discern during digitisation; and on the other, the creation of a semantic search system capable of interacting with the archive using natural language, for both text and images.
Dr Adriana Monroy-Galindo, one of the creators of this international challenge, plans to continue the project and explore new uses for historical archives through interdisciplinary research that integrates communication and computer engineering from a humanistic perspective.
The work has been carried out with the collaboration of UAB students and students from Germany (Hamburg University of Technology), France (INSA Toulouse), Finland (University of Tampere), Ireland (Dublin City University), Italy (University of Trento), Lithuania (Kaunas University of Technology), Poland (Łódź University of Technology), and Sweden (Linköping University).
The A-EYE challenge has been awarded the ECIU University Team Impact Award 2026—the highest annual honour bestowed by this alliance of twelve European universities—recognising teams that excel in collaboration, creativity, and the ability to develop solutions with real, sustainable impact within the ECIU ecosystem. The award was announced during the ECIU University Forum 2026, held in Aveiro, Portugal, on 16 and 17 June.
