EURECOM Wins Second European Heritage Award with Odeuropa Project!
EURECOM is proud to announce that the Odeuropa project, a pioneering European research initiative in which EURECOM played a key technological role, has been named a winner of the 2025 European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award in the Research category. This distinction, considered the highest recognition in Europe for cultural heritage, celebrates the exceptional achievements of projects that preserve and promote Europe’s rich and diverse heritage.
Led by the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Odeuropa brought together 35 researchers from six countries (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom) to explore the cultural significance of smell in European history between 1600 and 1920. The project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, marked the first large-scale initiative to place olfactory heritage at the center of historical research and museum interpretation.
At EURECOM, the project was driven by Prof. Raphaël Troncy, along with researchers Pasquale Lisena and Thibault Ehrhart, who led the development of cutting-edge AI technologies. Their tools made it possible to automatically extract and analyze more than 2.5 million olfactory experiences from historical texts and images in six European languages. These efforts powered key outputs such as the European Olfactory Knowledge Graph, the Smell Explorer database, and a suite of digital tools now used by museums and researchers across Europe to craft immersive, multisensory heritage narratives.
David Gesbert, EUREOM’s director add: "As a European engineering school and leading research lab pushing the frontiers of digital science, I think it is also our mission to educate the public on the costs and limitations of AI, but *also* on the many positives brought by AI, often in unexpected application domains. That's why it is so refreshing to see the value of AI for society being demonstrated so nicely, beyond the conventional borders of engineering and industry. Big kudos to the project team led Prof. Troncy!"
A second European Heritage Award for EURECOM!
This is not the first time EURECOM’s expertise in artificial intelligence and digital heritage has been recognized at the European level. In 2022, the SILKNOW project, also led by Prof. Troncy and his team, received the same award for its innovative use of AI to safeguard Europe’s silk heritage. Two European Heritage Awards in just three years is a rare and remarkable achievement, a testament to EURECOM’s continued commitment to applying advanced technology in the service of cultural preservation and innovation.
“Odeuropa’s interdisciplinary research in the emerging field of olfactory heritage fills a critical gap in our scientific understanding and creates new tools and data to support future research on historical scents and heritage,” noted the jury of the European Heritage Awards.
Key achievements of Odeuropa include:
- The AI-based identification of scent references in over 43,000 historical images and 167,000 books
- The creation of the first database to explore heritage through smell: Odeuropa Smell Explorer
- The development of a Storytelling Toolkit for Museums, co-created with perfumers and heritage scientists
- The training of over 760 students and the involvement of communities to collect “smell memories” and local knowledge
- The presentation of olfactory narratives in new museum exhibitions, educational tools, and even at the EU Pavilion at Expo 2025 in Osaka
Public Vote: Help Odeuropa win the Public Choice Award!
The Odeuropa team invites heritage supporters and the general public to vote for the Public Choice Award 2025. Voting is open until 12 September 2025 via the Europa Nostra website.
More information: https://odeuropa.eu
Contact at EURECOM: Prof. Raphaël Troncy – raphael.troncy@eurecom.fr
or communication@eurecom.fr
Congratulations to our partners across Europe, and thank you to the European Commission, Europa Nostra, the Creative Europe Programme for supporting this extraordinary project!