The American School of Classical Studies at Athens is pleased to invite zou to the Annual Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory Lecture:
“Digital Restoration of Archaeological Objects”
by Georgios Papaioannou.
Abstract
Fragmentation is a distinctive feature of archaeological material. The problem of restoration is very important to archaeological interpretation. The traditional manual reassembly process is time consuming and hindered by the loss of fragments. Moreover, although objectified, the process is largely interpretive. On the other hand, visual computing approaches, including computer graphics and shape analysis methods, have proven to be invaluable in the study, hypothesis testing and access to scientific data in the field of archaeology, providing quantitative and analytical methods to the cultural heritage experts. This presentation is an effort to provide insights on the application of visual computing methods to the restoration of archaeological artefacts and the potential these provide in the digital transformation of the process. The presentation covers the full cycle of the digital restoration, from physical to virtual, to augmented digital twin and virtually restored object and back to the physical form. It discusses the definition of a digital surrogate for the specific task of virtual restoration, the role of the cultural heritage expert, the possibilities and opportunities current and emerging computational solutions create and the potential issues that must be overcome for the community to benefit from the technology.
Guest Speaker
Georgios Papaioannou is an Associate Professor of Computer Graphics at the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) and head of the AUEB computer graphics group. He is currently the director of the MSc program in Digital Methods for the Humanities, member of the UNESCO chair for digital methods for the humanities and social sciences and administrator of the computer systems and communications department sector. His research is focused on real-time computer graphics algorithms, photorealistic rendering, shape analysis and geometry processing. He received a 4-year BSc in Computer Science in 1996 and a PhD degree in Computer Graphics and Shape Analysis in 2001, both from the National and Kapodestrian University of Athens, Greece. Since 1997, he has worked as a research fellow in many research and development projects. From 2002 till 2007 he worked as a software engineer in virtual reality systems at the Foundation of the Hellenic World. Prof. Papaioannou has been teaching elementary and advanced computer graphics, programming and human-computer interaction courses since 2002 and he has been the principal investigator for AUEB in many EU and nationally funded projects as well as R&D collaborations with the industrial sector. Prof. Papaioannou has more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed international scientific journals, conference proceedings and volumes, with more than 1900 citations to his work. He is also a member of ACM, SIGGRAPH, Eurographics Association and has been a member of the program committees of many conferences in the above fields.