Feb. 12 – Dr. Brent Seales, Dead Sea Scrolls

When we think of archaeology, we often conjure the image of Indiana Jones in a jungle temple or desert tomb. What if, instead, we see a man at a computer in a lab using high technology to recover the secrets of the past? That is exactly what Dr. Brent Seales does. He has recovered artifacts and information thought last forever. Imagine reading a 1700 year old bible or a 2000 year old scroll or seeing carvings on monoliths hundreds of years old. Brent has and is sharing these treasures with the world.

Dr. Seales has been teaching and mentoring students in computer science at the University of Kentucky since 1991. The focus of his research for the past twenty years has been on restoring and redeeming cultural and historical artifacts from the ravages of time. The challenge of rescuing texts that may be central to Biblical scholarship and the formation of the ancient world is a primary passion.

As a result of his innovations, Dr. Seales has become renowned by collectors and curators across the globe, earning a reputation as “the guy who can read the unreadable.” His breakthrough work on the scroll from En-Gedi received international recognition and was featured in Science Advances, the New York Times, Le Monde, and the Times of London.

In his presentation today, he will tell the story of virtual unwrapping, conceived during the rise of digital libraries, computer vision, and large-scale computing, and now realized on some of the most difficult and iconic material in the world – the Herculaneum Scrolls – as a result of the recent phenomena of big data and machine learning. Virtual unwrapping is a non-invasive restoration pathway for damaged written material, allowing texts to be read from objects too damaged even to be opened.

Dr. Seales is the Stanley and Karen Pigman Chair of Heritage Science and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has held research positions at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, UNC Chapel Hill, Google (Paris), and the Getty Conservation Institute. The Heritage Science research lab (EduceLab) founded by Seales at the University of Kentucky applies techniques in machine learning and data science to the digital restoration of damaged materials.

He continues to work with challenging, damaged material (Herculaneum Scrolls, Dead Sea Scrolls), with notable successes in the scroll from En-Gedi (Leviticus), the Morgan MS M.910 (The Acts of the Apostles), and PHerc.Paris.3 and 4 (Philodemus / Epicureanism). The recovery of readable text from still-unopened material has been hailed worldwide as an astonishing achievement fueled by open scholarship, interdisciplinary collaboration, and extraordinary leadership generosity.

The Editor thanks Eric Brooks for his contributions to this Meet Our Speaker piece.