MIT student prints AI polymer masks to restore paintings in hours

MIT graduate student Alex Kachkine once spent nine months meticulously restoring a damaged baroque Italian painting, which left him plenty of time to wonder if technology could speed things up. Last week, MIT News announced his solution: a technique that uses AI-generated polymer films to physically restore damaged paintings in hours rather than months. The research appears in Nature.

Kachkine's method works by printing a transparent "mask" containing thousands of precisely color-matched...