Quick, draw a sandwich! What does it look like? If you were from South Korea, you may have added pickled cucumber, or if you were from Sweden you might have drawn a smörgås i.e. open-faced sandwich. The way we draw reflects our environment and culture. We explored using a neural representation to analyze thousands of sketches from across the world, and found it revealed fascinating differences across countries. We further investigated predicting the country from the drawing, finding which countries have the most distinctive drawings and which drawing categories show the most geographical variations.
Special thanks to the IBM Visual AI lab for mentorship during this project.