And among the goals for today isn't necessarily Thio get you get you to decide exactly what final projects you're gonna work on but deceived you with the first of a series of ideas and domains outside of CS and outside of engineering more generally.

And what's so exciting about Peter's work is that of all the faculty I know on campus, he does such an amazing job at bringing technology to a very, very, very own Oldfield and his work in virtual reality and restoration of artifacts with three D printing and beyond it just wonderfully inspiring.

And so the goal ultimately for today is really just that to inspire and to get folks thinking about possible applications of CS to this world.

Fabulous.

Thanks, David.

And thanks, Benedikt.

Welcome to all of you in New Haven.

Nice to see you down there.

I love this concept of this course mixing digital applications and the humanities.

I'm basically a humanities guy.

There's some social sciences in there, too, because of archaeology.

And then, of course, on the science side, too, with computer science.

So I'm delighted to try toe mix all this stuff together.

So I've been running for a long, long time, almost 18 years now, Something called the Giza Project Not to be confused with Gaza.

This is Giza, the Great Pyramids to the west of modern Cairo.

Think about 2500 BC, and this has a strong, a tremendous Harvard legacy, based on excavations by someone named George Andrew Risner, Harvard Class of 18 89.

And in 1905 he brought something together called the Harvard M.

F A.

That stands for Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Expedition, And this is one of the longest running and most successful expeditions ever.

It went for about 40 years and worked at 23 different sites.

So everything you see in red and even off the screen down into the Sudan ancient Nubia we're part of the sites that he worked out.

But headquarters was always up at Giza.

That was the most important place.

So that's what we're gonna focus on today.

And I want to just show you a few of the ideas and challenges and technologies and exciting things were working on.

Maybe some of these will lead to some final project ideas for you and perhaps not.

We shall see.

So when you're dealing with Jesu, you've got all kinds of cool data sets.

You've got the data set that's still out at the site.

You may all know the three famous pyramids.

There's no decoration inside those those air royal tombs for pharaohs of the fourth Dynasty.

But then, surrounding the pyramids are hundreds and hundreds of rectangular structures called Master Baz.

These air tombs of non royal people, the elites of the pyramid age and inside many of them you get wonderful decorations, relief carvings, paintings, inscriptions.

These are the primary sources for anything you want to know about ancient Egypt, how they dressed, how they interacted, their craftsmanship, their costumes hire a graphic texts and grammar and funerary rituals, how they treated livestock, what their architecture looked like.

It's all there in these frozen moments for us, Egyptologist.

And then there's the other data set that came away from Geza.

First it was plunder than it was responsible.

Archaeology R H U M F A expedition work from about 1905 to 1942 when George Reisner died at the pyramids, and he's actually buried in old Cairo.

So all this is the kind of stuff that the excavators find, and they've ended up in museums all over the world, many of them right here in Boston, at the Museum of Fine Arts.

And along the way there were spectacular masterpieces as well, like this one, which is in the M F A, probably one of the top five sculptures from any period in in all of Egyptian history.

So what's the raw material that our project has been using?

It's this stuff rather unromantic looking, 21,000 glass plate expedition photographs, large size, almost the letter sized paper to midsize to four by five inches.

Drawings, maps and plans, architectural sections, figural drawings of wall scenes and hire, a graphic texts and other decoration boxes and boxes of prints and manuscript and things, published articles and then unpublished stuff is well, so how do you take a massive archive like this from an old expedition and try to make sense out of it?

Because who's got the time to get a grant to come up to Boston and open every one of those boxes?

So this is our plan.

This is our diagram.

We start in the middle with an individual tomb called the Master Ba of a single person.

Maybe it's a family group.

Maybe there's more than one person buried there, but then we round up everything that's related to that.

So we have a sequel database.

It's called TMS.

The museum system.

But a romantic title, huh?

It's made by a company called Gallery Systems in New York.

If you're interested in museum studies air going into the museum world, I would suggest that you might want to get comfortable with TMS because it's used in 700 museums around the world.

So about 2000 Fields sequel database Pretty useful.

And all of these things have to find their homes in the various media modules of the of the database.

So for one given tomb, do a search for it and up comes well.

I have this many photographs, old excavation shots, modern color photography.

I've got renderings.

I've got manuscript.

I've got published books.

I have new pictures.

I have architectural plans and drawings.

The object register, the database of its time right where rising and the team gave a sketch of every object gave it a number.

Measurements.

Where did it come from?

The archaeological providence, new photography drawings?

Everything that is related gets linked.

So we chugged along, doing this with the remnants or the archive of the Harvard M F A expedition for many years and then realize doesn't do you any good if you know everything about two number one right here because it was dug by the Americans.

But nothing by this about this tomb over here, because the Germans excavated it or the Italians did.

So we went on the road years ago, and we rounded up all the big players.

All of these cities and institutions dug directly at Giza, and they all got stuff.

And so we signed agreements with all of them that we got them to hand over all their photos and diaries and maps and plans and things.

And, of course, it never comes in in the format that you want to go right into your sequel database.

It's gotta be massaged, so there's no end of data entry.

We launched one website back in 2005.

It's now but frozen since 2011 and then we've just built this new one at Harvard.

It's ah, giza dot f a s that Harvard daddy, you There it is.

And it's, ah, more modern and robust website.

You can see the totals if you just hit the go button without even typing anything.

You'll get the list of everything that's in there right now, all cross linked and hopefully intelligently reference.

This is still a work in progress and a lot of the cooler things like saving collections and sharing them with colleagues.

Those things aren't quite built yet, and we want to get to those.

We also want to put the page viewer in called Mirador, the Triple I F page viewing system that was developed between Harvard and Stanford that lets you zoom in on images and flip through them book like an annotate them and do all kinds of cool stuff.

So there a lot of things that are still coming, And then we've also moved into the three D modeling section of the world here.

So it's not just the old Dig photos on the discoveries, but now we want to cruise around the site, fly over it in three d.

We want to dive down burial shafts.

We want to restore things.

We get views of tombs both above ground chambers and underground chambers that we wouldn't get in any other way.

Course we can rotate the's.

In this case, you see the original excavators section drawing and plan drawing superimposed in this studio max file, right with the three D models you can compare and see how you're doing.

The other variable, then, is avatars right?

Bringing humans in, which is always tricky, because are they dressed appropriately?

Are they doing the right things?

Do we know what this room is?

Four.

And are these guys doing the right stuff?

It's a whole another level of complexity and rendering, and then if you're going to get it on the Web, it's pretty tricky, too.

So this is all moving into the same kind of large repositories.

We believe that Geza is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world, and it needs a center.

It needs an institute.

If it's not a brick and mortar structure them, at least we can get this website online and along the way, with reconstructions who may have played with assassins create and things like that and you're always wondering what's accurate.

What's fantasy?

What speculation.

So along the way, we're trying to get away from that Wild West concept of wondering how did that all happen and build a system where we've got a kind of a digital paper trail.

So if that wall is this high now, you know why.

Well, it was excavated at three feet.

We're speculating that it was originally five feet, and here's why.

There's a similar building at another site that's done the same way, or it's based on this excavation reporter publication.

So we're trying to bring some order into the chaos of three D modeling and reconstruction.

Why do we do this stuff?

Because sites like this are doomed.

Here's an example 1927 and today you can see what we're beautiful.

Engage statues are now hurting, whether it's salts coming to the surface and leeching away the decoration or vandalism, lopping the faces off and bringing them to the art market.

All kinds of challenges not everyone can get to these places.

The tombs are often locked or reburied or not, uh, open for public view.

So visualization is another part of the project that we experiment with here we are actually on top of the corner of the Great Pyramid.

That's why these guys are trying not to fall off a CZ.

They walk around right here.

And this is great fun.

These air, HTC Vives or Oculus goes and other devices.

I'm trying to bring this to Harvard next semester.

So people in our science center might be able to have the experience of walking around on top of the Great Pyramid.

And our modeling also brings up questions of restoration.

So this was originally found as a deteriorated mess.

Ah, 100 feet underground.

All the wood was deteriorated.

Insects floods, all of that.

But with meticulous archaeological documentation, you can then start to put things back together.

So we have a three d reconstruction visit Doble in our visualization lab in another classroom where I teach Aggies, of course, and that lets you do some cool things, not only restore the tomb.

That's what everything you just saw looked like in 1925 when the excavators got there and it turned out to be the mother of the king who built the Great Pyramid.

And here's all her funerary bedroom set there was, however, a very complicated second chair, and no one even knew what it should look like based on this mess.

But we were able to put it back together based on the original excavation records, and then the next step was to actually build it physically.

So based on a computer model, are CNC Router is actually carving real cedarwood and making the arms of that chair.

We got really gold.

We learned how to make fans tiles, and this is now an exhibit at the Harvard Semitic Museum, where unfortunate to be the director, too.

So I get to say what goes on view and what doesn't so mixing things from the virtual world to the real world.

It's kind of a fun exercise.

It's not just the research website anymore.

It's a museum exhibit piece.

It's a teaching tool, and we're blending the boundaries a little bit.

So here's another example.

This is a famous stealer that stands today still, between the paws of the Great Sphinx of Giza, talks about a prince 1000 years after the Sphinx was carved, who comes and takes a nap in the shadow of the Sphinx and the Sphinx appears to him in a dream and says, Dude, I'm covered in sand.

If you will make me if you will dig the sand out, I will make you Pharaoh And that's what this story tells you.

So we wanted to make a reproduction of this in modern resin.

Using an old plaster cast on my creative curator is doing this very analog project here makes the mold pulls away this rubbery mold, and we've got instant modern colored resin that looks just like pink granite, and we set that up in the Harvard Semitic Museum.

I'd love to recreate the Sphinx, but I don't have the ceiling height.

So the next thing to do is an augmented reality display so the students can download this app.

You can do it, too.

It's on Apple or Google play store.

It's called Dreaming the Sphinx, and what you do is download it.

If you're in the museum, you aim at the the steel and it becomes the target.

And bit by bit, you can hit the next button and cycle through the English translation of all of these little pieces.

If you're in New Haven, for example, you can download a two page pdf.

Aim your phone at the higher glitz and the same thing will happen.

That's one feature another is.

You can hit the other button and you'll actually be standing between the paws of the Sphinx, and you can look around in 360 and see what it's like to be there.

Or hit the time slider and move ahead 1000 years and see it in the Old Kingdom, in the New Kingdom or, in its present, a condition today like this.

And then you can cycle around and see what it's like to stand between the paws of the Sphinx, which are out of bounds these days.

Regular tourists can't get there.

One other thing this display does is we experimented with floor targets.

And so if you aim your phone at this floor, target up pops the sphinx again and once more with the chronological slider, so you can see it Before that steal.

A came 1000 years earlier, maybe what it looked like in the Old Kingdom than the New Kingdom, when the Steeler comes in and a statue of the King and then finally in its current state so you can download this app and you can do this is about 150 Meg.