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Nov. 12, 2020

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Prof. Ohad Ben Shahar has been awarded a 3.5M Euro grant together with collaborators from Italy, Portugal and Germany from the European union as part of the FET Open program. This prestigious program funds cutting edge projects aiming to bring to reality new ideas for radically new future technologies. 

The project is aiming to revolutionize an important aspect of archaeological research: physical reconstruction of shattered artworks. Reconstruction of small artifacts is typically done by experienced operators, possibly with the assistance of dedicated software, but when the number of fragments is large (say, of the order of thousands) manual or computer-assisted restoration is simply hopeless. By developing and integrating novel technologies in the fields of robotics, computer vision and artificial intelligence, Prof. Ben Shahar and his collaborators plan to change this situation. Their goal is to design and construct robots that could reconstruct the artifacts automatically. The researchers plan to test their technology on a fascinating excavation site in Pompei which includes thousands of pieces of murals that have been waiting to be reconstructed for a very long time. 

If successful, Prof. Ben Shahar and his collaborators’ efforts will allow dealing effectively with reconstruction problems at an unprecedented scale and will be able to bring back to life ancient artworks and masterpieces which would otherwise remain broken into pieces forever. To pull off this tremendous effort Prof. Ben Shahar and his colleague from the university of venice gathered a consortium of experts from different countries with expertise in AI, computational vision and robotics.


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