Docent was born out of a love for art and a desire to make it accessible to everyone. In the midst of the 2020 pandemic, Helene Nguyen-Ban, a passionate collector and former gallery owner, and Mathieu Rosenbaum, an award-winning scientist in applied mathematics at Ecole Polytechnique, recognized the need for a new way to discover and collect contemporary art. They put a team machine learning engineers, data scientists and experts in the art market together, and created Docent.

Art+Science

Art+
Science

Helene Nguyen-Ban

CEO

Founder and CEO of Docent, Helene Nguyen-Ban’s first foray into contemporary art as a collector was driven by the same curiosity and passion that would later chart her path as an esteemed gallerist and a tech start-up founder: she brings years of expert insight and research from the field as well as a boundless passion for innovation in art. On top of her current role at Docent, she also serves on the International Council of Tate, the Asia-Pacific Committee at Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, the AWARE jury prize and is Chair of the board of Fluxus Art Projects.

Mathieu Rosenbaum

CSO

Mathieu Rosenbaum is a Scientist and Chair holder in Applied Mathematics at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. His research specializes in developing new models and algorithms to solve real-world problems in health, sports, finance, and the arts. Rosenbaum's work has received many awards, including the Louis Bachelier Prize in 2020 and the Quant of the Year award in 2021. As the Co-Founder and CSO of Docent, Mathieu is dedicated to optimizing the way the platform captures and analyzes the tastes of collectors, using advanced algorithms.

Our Background

Our dedicated team’s academic and professional backgrounds combine unique expertises.

Technology

Harness the Power of Machine Learning to Discover Art Beyond Your Echo Chamber

Docent’s technology uses data and human expertise to create personalised recommendations unique to each user. Sourcing the most reliable and accurate information about artists, we trained our algorithms under the supervision of a team of art experts, both in-house and in collaboration with galleries and institutions, to ensure that Docent’s recommendations are relevant and captivating.

We acknowledge that a single work of art is a node in a complex web of signifiers and attributes. Docent’s algorithms form associations between artworks based on multiple perspectives and attempts to map the social, cultural and aesthetic complexities that exist in and around a work of art.

With Computer Vision Technology, we developed a large range of potential criteria to assess the aesthetic patterns and visual characteristics of a work of art, specifically designed for the nuances of contemporary art. In combination with Natural Language Processing (NLP), our algorithm reads millions of text-based information in order to decrypt and capture the themes and topics an artist might engage with in their practice.

Docent seeks to enhance an individual’s knowledge of contemporary art by offering an opportunity to tap into a collective, human intelligence, made more visible through technological advancement. Our unique algorithm evolves as you evolve, empowering you to discover, learn and appreciate art from multiple perspectives.

Manifesto

Designed for and transformed by our community

We, at Docent, are on this journey with you. Our mission is to continuously self-assess, improve and create an app that we hope will transform and be transformed by our community.

Our community values are based on a deep passion for art, a desire to educate, striving to create a virtuous cycle benefitting and engaging the art ecosystem.

Eliminate Bias and Embrace Diversity

We are aware of the power that algorithms and social media may have in shaping and defining our knowledge base today and at times amplifying existing biases. At Docent, we have a clear ethos to attempt to eliminate bias and embrace diversity.

As societies continue to systematically and institutionally address the existing cultural and human biases that pervade cultures, Docent recognises the possibility of machine learning to address these issues by presenting more than what is just popular or hyped: our algorithm assigns an equal probability to each artist to be recommended, based on a user's preferences.

Cut Out the Noise

With the emergence and abundance of digital content, OVRs, art marketplaces, there may at times feel like an overload of information - and that is merely in the digital realm.

We believe that nothing can replicate or replace the experience of discovering art in real life. At Docent, we want to provide a streamlined entry point to access art online with greater curation and personalisation through innovative design.