Stephen Parsons

"Reading Unreadable Ancient Scrolls"

ABSTRACT -- In 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum. Hidden inside a villa in Herculaneum was a library of papyrus scrolls, carbonized and sealed in place, now representing the only library from antiquity to be preserved in situ. This talk presents a pipeline for reading inside these fragile scrolls without opening them, using X-ray imaging, computer vision, and machine learning. Processing terabytes of computed tomography images requires machine learning and computer vision in order to make sense of the mess of papyrus fibers, ink, and volcanic detritus within. But once the scroll is virtually unwrapped and text is visible, human scholars are vital to the textual reconstruction and transcription. We discuss some of the open challenges in the effort to recover the texts from this unique collection, including the frontiers where AI is helpful and those areas where human input and scholarship remain critical.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Stephen Parsons completed his PhD in computer science in 2023, using machine learning to detect the elusive carbon ink on the Herculaneum scrolls from CT scans. These methods are now being extended successfully by a worldwide team and community through Vesuvius Challenge, a global research contest for which Stephen is the Project Lead.

Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov