The 2025 Harrison Goodall Fellow has been selected! Todd Matuszewicz will spend the year working on his capstone project: AI Large Visual Model for Identifying Historic Properties – Pioneering Surveying and Building Identification Efforts in Denver (working title: Creating a Modern Digital Sanborn Map). The Creating a Modern Digital Sanborn Map project aims to expedite the ability of cities to survey and document their cultural resources utilizing emerging technology.
Todd has a long career an educator, neon tube bender and sign restorer. He is currently pursuing a Historic Preservation Master’s Degree as the University of Colorado Denver. Todd also works as a historic building researcher for Historic Denver. Their Discover Denver program is a trail-blazing effort to document every building in Denver, approximately 160,000 in total. The process relies on volunteers to photograph and manually enter pertinent architectural and historical features. The data is quality-checked by professionals who identify potential properties for further research. The team has reviewed nearly 40,000 cases in 10 years. Todd will utilize this invaluable data to create a machine-assisted large visual model (LVM), an Artificial Intelligence agent, to perform the initial analysis. The goal of the Creating a Modern Digital Sanborn Map project is to introduce a working agent to the Discover Denver process and reduce the project’s completion date from thirty years to eight years. Supported by a multidisciplinary team of professionals, Todd will develop an open-source AI model that can be easily trained to recognize not only other regionally distinct architectural styles, but to be trainable to survey non-building resources: i.e. signs, roadside colossi, and culturally modified trees.
The Goodall Fellowship Committee looks for proposals that will make a meaningful contribution to the broader field of historic preservation and support the stewardship of public and private historic resources across the country. The Committee selected Todd’s project for its potential contributions to preservation, as well as Todd’s his commitment to the fundamental values of preservation. Knowledge is power. The world will be guided, not by AI, but by those who know how to utilize it.
Read more about Todd’s project and other Goodall Fellows here.