Husker wins grand prize for global Vesuvius Challenge
Aaron Nix
Author
12/20/2023
Added
7504
Plays
Description
Luke Farritor, a senior in UNL's Raikes School, is the first to decode a passage of text from an ancient scroll using AI. He's the co-winner of the $700,000 Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize. Read more about his discoveries here: https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article-2/
Searchable Transcript
Toggle between list and paragraph view.
- [00:00:00.000](contemplative music)
- [00:00:09.041]So I've always been interested in history.
- [00:00:10.625]Growing up, I learned Latin.
- [00:00:12.125]I was never that good at it, but I was always kind of into that sort of stuff.
- [00:00:14.791]Read a lot about the Roman Empire and things.
- [00:00:16.958]And one day I was just listening to a podcast back in March.
- [00:00:20.041]It was with Nat Friedman.
- [00:00:21.250]He just kind of got on the podcast, explained like,
- [00:00:23.375]there are these burnt up scrolls that were buried in the Pompeii eruption.
- [00:00:26.958]No one knows how to read them, but some professors have created CT
- [00:00:30.875]scans of these scrolls and they uploaded the data on the Internet
- [00:00:34.291]as a competition to see who could find writing inside of these scrolls.
- [00:00:37.750]And when I heard that idea, I was just immediately like,
- [00:00:39.875]Oh my goodness, this is such a cool project.
- [00:00:42.166]I have to work on this.
- [00:00:43.291]I just went home from work that day,
- [00:00:44.958]at the end of the day and working on it evenings and weekends ever since.
- [00:00:48.333]I run most of the things from my laptop.
- [00:00:50.291]It's just a normal Macbook, don't worry.
- [00:00:52.083]But then I've just got like five surplus computers in here.
- [00:00:56.333]This is what I do most of my work from.
- [00:01:00.791]The Raikes School
- [00:01:01.541]and just the University of Nebraska as a whole has provided
- [00:01:04.041]a great educational background where I can then, you know, take these skills
- [00:01:07.250]that I've learned and apply them to problems like this.
- [00:01:12.625]I just spend hours upon hours staring at
- [00:01:16.250]flattened pieces of the scroll like this, trying to find these patterns,
- [00:01:19.333]which are part of the writing.
- [00:01:21.875]At the start of the challenge
- [00:01:23.291]we had not been able to find any writing at all within these scrolls.
- [00:01:27.041]There are hundreds of these scrolls that are from the mansion.
- [00:01:29.458]We've scanned a couple of them
- [00:01:31.041]and no one had been able to find any writing in them using these methods.
- [00:01:35.125]Late one Saturday night I was sitting at a party
- [00:01:37.833]at a friend's house in Omaha
- [00:01:39.458]and I got a text from another person on the challenge team and he says, “Hey,
- [00:01:43.166]I've just uploaded this new kind of piece of the scroll.
- [00:01:46.458]You should take a look at it.”
- [00:01:47.750]I remotely access my computer.
- [00:01:49.250]I type into it like, “Please run the algorithm on this new piece of scroll.”
- [00:01:53.416]And then I just kind of start it. I pull out my phone again
- [00:01:55.708]just nonchalantly like, “Hey, I wonder how that went.”
- [00:01:58.041]And there are three Greek letters on the screen.
- [00:02:00.166]Letters I'd never seen before.
- [00:02:01.916]It was really cool because it's like, Oh my goodness, like
- [00:02:04.708]we actually detected new writing in the scrolls using A.I..
- [00:02:07.791]And that was the moment I realized, like, this is actually going to work.
- [00:02:10.166]Like, we were probably going to read the scrolls.
- [00:02:12.583]And I completely freaked out.
- [00:02:13.625]My friends were there and I was cheering, jumping up and down,
- [00:02:16.375]you know, screaming, crying all the stuff.
- [00:02:18.166]I, you know, took a picture of the results and I sent them to my mom.
- [00:02:21.458]She called me and she's like, “Hey, these look great!” You know?
- [00:02:24.125]It was a really special moment.
- [00:02:25.666]Yeah.
- [00:02:25.916]So this is the the word that I actually found.
- [00:02:28.375]It's right here.
- [00:02:29.125]It's the word Porphyras, which translates to purple.
- [00:02:33.166]It's the first word we found in the scrolls.
- [00:02:34.916]It was reviewed by a committee of kind of Greek scholars, but it's the word purple.
- [00:02:38.958]And I'm glad it's not the word “in” or “the” or “an” that we found
- [00:02:41.958]first, we actually found a word that has meaning.
- [00:02:44.666]This would not be possible without modern A.I.
- [00:02:47.041]modern scanning text techniques.
- [00:02:48.791]People wanted to read these books for hundreds of years and this
- [00:02:51.833]seems like the only way
- [00:02:52.791]that's where it's really possible to do that.
- [00:02:55.291]Now we're reading entire paragraphs from the scrolls,
- [00:02:57.833]and hopefully we'll be able to read the entire book and read the hundreds
- [00:03:00.916]of other books that were buried in this condition as well.
- [00:03:04.291]When you found this first word, you know, we went public with it.
- [00:03:06.625]And I think everyone has been very pleasantly surprised
- [00:03:08.875]by the amount of attention it's gotten.
- [00:03:10.583]As a college student, it's definitely been overwhelming in the best way possible.
- [00:03:14.166]But it's been really cool to get to kind of, you know, talk about my findings
- [00:03:17.333]and, you know, share what I want to do in the future with so many people.
- [00:03:20.791]So it's been overwhelming in the best possible way.
- [00:03:23.541]The University of Nebraska does a really good job
- [00:03:25.750]of encouraging their students to think boldly.
- [00:03:27.583]And I think that's played a pivotal role in my work on this project.
The screen size you are trying to search captions on is too small!
You can always jump over to MediaHub and check it out there.
Log in to post comments
Embed
Copy the following code into your page
HTML
<div style="padding-top: 56.25%; overflow: hidden; position:relative; -webkit-box-flex: 1; flex-grow: 1;">
<iframe
style="bottom: 0; left: 0; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; border: 0; height: 100%; width: 100%;"
src="https://mediahub.unl.edu/media/21707?format=iframe&autoplay=0"
title="Video Player: Husker wins grand prize for global Vesuvius Challenge"
allowfullscreen
></iframe>
</div>
Comments
0 Comments