DH-Kolloquium an der BBAW, 14.2.2019, „The Hieroglyphics Initiative: an open source digital platform for Egyptology“

Der nächste Termin des DH-Kolloquiums an der BBAW findet nicht wie gewohnt am ersten Freitag des Monats statt, sondern am 14. Februar 2019 um 18 Uhr und wird zusammen mit dem Akademienvorhaben „Strukturen und Transformationen des Wortschatzes der ägyptischen Sprache. Text- und Wissenskultur im Alten Ägypten“ veranstaltet. Gemeinsam möchten wir Sie herzlich zu folgendem Vortrag einladen:

„The Hieroglyphics Initiative: an open source digital platform for Egyptology“
Alex Frym, Psycle / Hieroglyphics Initiative
Roy Gardner, Psycle / Hieroglyphics Initiative

Donnerstag, 14.02.2019, 18 Uhr
Akademiegebäude am Gendarmenmarkt
Einstein-Saal, Jägerstraße 22-23, 10117 Berlin

Can we train a machine to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs? This is the question the independent production company Psycle explored in a Ubisoft research project. Taking the facsimiles created by Egyptologists as our starting point, we created a processing pipeline that begins with photographs of hieroglyphs in situ, and ends with possible translations in a modern language. The pipeline uses computer vision techniques to find candidate glyphs and glyph groups in an automatically generated facsimile. Next, neural nets are used to recognise the candidate glyphs and, finally, sequences of glyphs are compared to dictionaries of glyph words in order to find possible translations.

The lecture discusses not only the technical challenges of the project, but also highlights the limitations of machine learning, and the critical importance of the amount and consistency of data for enterprises of this type. The engagement and support of the academic community, which was crucial in giving direction and substance to the project, is also discussed.

The project has generated a research and teaching tool for Egyptologists, an open-source repository of code, and several avenues for further research and collaboration.

Bitte beachten Sie, dass diesmal eine seperate Anmeldung bis zum 07.02. über die Website der BBAW nötig ist: http://www.bbaw.de/hieroglyphic