{"id":445254,"date":"2023-05-12T06:30:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-12T04:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/innovationorigins.com\/?p=445254"},"modified":"2023-05-12T06:30:00","modified_gmt":"2023-05-12T04:30:00","slug":"unearthing-pompeiis-secrets-with-cutting-edge-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/en\/unearthing-pompeiis-secrets-with-cutting-edge-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Unearthing Pompeii’s secrets with cutting-edge technology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cAt about one in the afternoon, my mother pointed out a cloud with an odd size and appearance that had just formed. From that distance, it was not clear from which mountain the cloud was rising, although it was found afterward to be Vesuvius.\u201d That\u2019s how Pliny the Younger described \u2013 in a letter<\/a> to the Roman historian Tacitus \u2013 the buildup of the Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD. The eructation blanketed the surrounding area of Pompeii, Stabiae, and Herculaneum with meters of ashes and lava. A villa with an extensive library of papyrus scrolls \u2013 owned by the father-in-law of the Roman general Julius Caesar \u2013 was covered too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Vesuvius Challenge<\/a> is pushing its participants to uncover the content of the Papyri\u2019s villa parchments using state-of-art technology. Computed tomography<\/a> (CT), machine learning (ML), and computer vision techniques are available to its contestants. There’s time until the end of the year to read a few passages to win a $ 700,000-worth grand prize.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although almost two thousand years passed by, the papyri are still intact. The volcanic debris\u2019 heat carbonized them, but they stayed preserved underground. In the past decade, work by a team at the University of Kentucky<\/a> directed by Dr. Brent Seales led to several breakthroughs in the discipline, reducing the puzzle to a mere software problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very tantalizing because, on the one hand, these papyri have been preserved, but on the other, we can\u2019t read them yet,\u201d says JP Posma, project lead of the Vesuvius Challenge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Uncovering the past<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Pliny the Younger is the only eyewitness of the Vesuvius 79 AD eruption. On August 24, he was in Misenum, a village on Naples\u2019 Bay where his uncle Pliny the Elder lived. The Elder \u2013 author and naturalist \u2013 moved by his passion for science, decided to sail towards the cloud, eventually dying because of volcanic exhalations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1750, a farmer stumbled across a marble pavement while digging a well, finding the Papyrus villa. The first archeological research immediately started, and many scrolls were retrieved. In 2015, Seales\u2019 working group<\/a> read the En-Gedi scroll \u2013 an ancient Hebrew parchment found in the Dead Sea \u2013 without opening it but using an X-ray scan and computer vision. The cohort wanted to apply CT to the Herculaneum Papyri too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four tweets from the past <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Therefore, in 2019, they used a particle accelerator to scan two full scrolls retrieved in the villa, inferring that ML models could recognize surface patterns indicating the presence of ink. Earlier this year, their ML model recognized ink from the scans. Fascinated by Roman history and learning about the efforts done by the Seales team, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman came up with the idea of a prize. \u201cThe reason we\u2019re doing this challenge is that we still think that it requires the collective brain power of many to decipher the scrolls,\u201d explains Posma.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The $700.000 grand prize will be handed out to the team who will read four passages of 140 characters each by the end of this year. Posma emphasizes that getting there will take a lot of effort as it requires the mastering of different technologies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
A reconstruction of the Papyri’s villa. – \u00a9 Museo Archelogico Virtuale di Ercolano<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Technologies to read the scrolls<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

CT \u2013 no different than what\u2019s used for medical checks \u2013 sends X-rays through the object, getting a picture on the other side. \u201cBut then, one can rotate the object to get many pictures from different angles. Through tomography, one can reconstruct a 3D image from all those pictures,\u201d clarifies Posma. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To get a high resolution out of these scans, there is a need for a high-quality energy source and specific light incidences. Such conditions can be found in particle accelerators \u2014 which were indeed used by Seales\u2019 team. The next step is reading the scroll\u2019s content, which at this stage is a conglomerate of voxels \u2013 the data points in a 3D grid. Then, it\u2019s up to computer vision software to identify characters and try reading them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team is introducing another piece of technology to decrypt Pompeii’s parchments. The ink used in Herculean papyri is carbon-based, which doesn\u2019t allow any X-ray scan to generate contrast. In the En-Gedi scroll case, the ink contained some metal, allowing it to show characters. \u2018\u2019Since they wrote on it, there must be some morphological change in the papyrus\u2019 surface. The idea is, therefore, to train a neural network with pictures of how a bit of scroll with and without ink looks like in the CT scan, and then it\u2019s about inferring patterns and eventually showing some characters,\u2019\u2019 underlines Posma. <\/p>\n\n\n

<\/div><\/div>
AI to shed light on ancient Greek, Mayan and Akkadian languages<\/div>
Ithaca\u00a0is the first deep neural network that can aid historians in not only restoring the missing text of damaged inscriptions, but also identifying their original location, and establishing the date they were written.<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

Thrilled by mystery <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In addition to the grand prize, other awards recognize the teams’ efforts \u2013 such as an accolade for the team that detects ink from X-rays. There is still time to join the community in this cooperative endeavor. \u201cWhat could there be in that library? Maybe some documents can tell us more about the functioning of the Roman Empire. The intriguing aspect is that this might only be the tip of the iceberg. Archeologists think this is a secondary library, and the main one must still be excavated. We hope that, if we can read these scrolls, we can renew interest in the topic,\u201d sums up Posma. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAt about one in the afternoon, my mother pointed out a cloud with an odd size and appearance that had just formed. From that distance, it was not clear from which mountain the cloud was rising, although it was found afterward to be Vesuvius.\u201d That\u2019s how Pliny the Younger described \u2013 in a letter to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2084,"featured_media":495154,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8553],"tags":[77772,77774,70438,30608,77777],"location":[76794],"article_type":[36684],"serie":[],"archives":[],"internal_archives":[],"reboot-archive":[],"class_list":["post-445254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital","tag-archaeology","tag-computer-vision-2","tag-machine-learning-3","tag-machine-learning","tag-vesuvius-challenge","location-united-states","article_type-news"],"blocksy_meta":[],"acf":{"subtitle":"The Vesuvius Challenge involves its participants in reading two-millennia-old scrolls using the latest technologies. ","text_display_homepage":false},"author_meta":{"display_name":"Mauro Mereu","author_link":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/author\/mauro-mereu\/"},"featured_img":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/OIG-1.jpeg","coauthors":[],"tax_additional":{"categories":{"linked":["Digital<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Digital<\/span>"]},"tags":{"linked":["archaeology<\/a>","computer vision<\/a>","machine learning<\/a>","machine learning<\/a>","Vesuvius Challenge<\/a>"],"unlinked":["archaeology<\/span>","computer vision<\/span>","machine learning<\/span>","machine learning<\/span>","Vesuvius Challenge<\/span>"]}},"comment_count":"0","relative_dates":{"created":"Posted 3 years ago","modified":"Updated 3 years ago"},"absolute_dates":{"created":"Posted on May 12, 2023","modified":"Updated on May 12, 2023"},"absolute_dates_time":{"created":"Posted on May 12, 2023 6:30 am","modified":"Updated on May 12, 2023 6:30 am"},"featured_img_caption":"","series_order":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2084"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445254\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/495154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445254"},{"taxonomy":"location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/location?post=445254"},{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=445254"},{"taxonomy":"serie","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/serie?post=445254"},{"taxonomy":"archives","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/archives?post=445254"},{"taxonomy":"internal_archives","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/internal_archives?post=445254"},{"taxonomy":"reboot-archive","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/reboot-archive?post=445254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}