Apr 25, 2012

CISA3 Paper Accepted to COM.Geo Conference

COM.Geo 2012, a leading conference on computing for geospatial fields, has accepted a paper with several CISA3 co-authors. Lead author Yuma Matsui will present the paper on ArchaeoSTOR Map: Publishing Archaeological Geodata on the Web. The conference begins July 1 in Reston, Virginia. Matsui's co-authors include CISA3 director Falko Kuester and associate director Tom Levy, as well as IGERT Trainee Aaron Gidding and Calit2 visualization director Tom DeFanti.


Apr 16, 2012

Invited by U.S. State Department, UC San Diego Researcher Engages Students, Public in South Africa

At Scifest Africa, CISA3 researcher Albert Yu-Min Lin spoke about his four-year project in search of the lost tomb of Genghis Khan and other cultural heritage sites in Mongolia. Lin's talk was sponsored by the U.S. State Department as part of its public democracy program.


Mar 12, 2012

Data Support Theory on Location of Lost Leonardo da Vinci Painting

Evidence uncovered during research conducted in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio late last year appears to support the theory that a lost Leonardo da Vinci painting existed on the east wall of the Hall of the 500, behind Giorgio Vasari’s mural “The Battle of Marciano.” The data supporting the theoretical location of the da Vinci painting “The Battle of Anghiari” was obtained through the use of an endoscopic probe that was inserted through the wall on which the Vasari fresco was painted. The probe was fitted with a camera and allowed a team of researchers, led by scientist Maurizio Seracini, to see what was behind the Vasari and gather samples for further testing.


Mar 7, 2012

UC San Diego in the Hall of the Lost Da Vinci

Why are the UC San Diego name and logo prominently displayed across one of the most famous walls in Florence? It is a story that starts more than five hundred years ago, when a Leonardo Da Vinci mural of the ‘Battle of Anghiari’ was painted on the wall of the Salone dei Cinquecento (the Hall of the Five Hundred).


Mar 6, 2012

IGERT Faculty, Trainees and Staff in the Hall of the Lost Da Vinci

Why are the UC San Diego name and logo prominently displayed across one of the most famous walls in Florence? It is a story that starts more than five hundred years ago, when a Leonardo Da Vinci mural of the ‘Battle of Anghiari’ was painted on the wall of the Salone dei Cinquecento (the Hall of the Five Hundred).


Jan 22, 2012

UC San Diego professor conducts “cyber-archaeology” in lands far away

The fall dig at the new site has revealed not only information about the Edomite kingdom but about societies that conducted copper mining in the area both before and after Old Testaments times, including from the Bronze Age (3000 to 2000 B.C.) to the Roman and Byzantine empires “and all the way up to a medieval Islamic period in the 14th or 15 century,” Levy said. The fall dig at the new site involved 10 undergraduates and 10 graduates — and a great deal of technology. Levy’s team takes to the field a variety of computers, global positioning systems, x-ray fluorescent instruments, light detecting and ranging units and even stereo cameras flown over the sight on a balloon system.


Dec 5, 2011

Revealing “The Battle of Anghiari"

The search for Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Battle of Anghiari” conducted in the Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio is a project led by the National Geographic Society and UC San Diego’s Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology, in cooperation with the City of Florence. Work commenced on November 27, 2011, and this phase, led by the project’s director of scientific research, Dr. Maurizio Seracini, will employ the use of an endoscopic probe. Updates on findings from the work conducted during this phase of the research will be provided after the work is completed, although it is expected that full analysis of the images and data collected will take several weeks.


Oct 25, 2011

First Publication from Cyprus Archaeomagnetic Project

CISA3 Associate Director Tom Levy and IGERT Trainee Matthew Vincent and IGERT Associate Ashley Richter were part of an expedition in late August to Cyprus. The Cyprus Archaeomagnetic Project (CAMP) explored ancient metal slag heaps spanning the first millennia BC and AD. The goal was to clarify the stratigraphy and chronology, while undertaking an archaeomagnetic analysis to provide clues to the history of metallurgy on the island – and comparing the metal to remnants found elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the journal Antiquity (vol. 85 issue 330, December 2011), Levy and co-authors Erez Ben-Yosef (UCSD alumnus), Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Ron Shaar and Lisa Tauxe, and Vasiliki Kassianidou from the University of Cyprus argue that "high resolution recording of these slag deposits, especially those threatened by development and modern mining, will help in conservation of one of the most important cultural heritages of the island." The expedition was particularly important because Cyprus was one of the major sources of copper in the eastern Mediterranean in antiquity. Researchers are still sorting through LIDAR and other data.


Oct 20, 2011

UC San Diego Researchers Receive Explorers Club Awards

Two key players in CISA3 and IGERT-TEECH, Tom Levy and Albert Lin, have received two of the six Lowell Thomas Awards handed out annually by the venerable Explorers Club. They were cited, in part, for their field expeditions to Jordan and Mongolia, respectively. To read the full news release, click on the title above.


Oct 19, 2011

IGERT Trainee, Associate at Field Sites in Cyprus, Jordan

IGERT Trainee Matthew Vincent and associate Ashley Richter left San Diego on Aug. 25 for an expedition in Cyprus. From there in mid-September, the two Anthropology grad students flew to Jordan, where they are working on IGERT co-PI Tom Levy's fall expedition in Faynan. In Cyprus, they explored an ancient mining complex at Skouriotissa northwest of Nicosia. Incoming grad student Ashley Richter carried out the LiDAR survey for the project that was focused on geomagnetism at the ancient copper-mining site; she is the recipient of a San Diego Fellowship to take part in the NSF IGERT program. Richter and Vincent are due back in San Diego on Nov. 27.


Oct 17, 2011

First IGERT Trainee Returns from Field Expedition

CSE grad student Andrew Huynh was the first IGERT Trainee to reach a foreign field site -- in his case, Mongolia, as the human computation specialist on Albert Lin's UCSD-National Geographic expedition in search of Genghis Khan's unknown burial site. He returned in August, after providing updates to the expedition blog. Huynh's research focuses on combining the application of machine learning to satellite images and human computation, or crowdsourcing.


Oct 12, 2011

Field Site in Florence Hosts Two Waves of IGERT Students


Two groups of IGERT grad students have rotated through Florence since mid-July. Structural Engineering Ph.D. students Richard Wood, Christine Wittich and CSE's Tom Wypych worked with CISA3 Director Maurizio Seracini on IGERT projects in the Palazzo Medici and Palazzo Vecchio. They returned to UCSD in mid-September, just as MAE's Samantha Stout and CSE's David Vanoni and Vid Petrovic were leaving for Florence, where they are preparing for a major November study related to the Battle of Anghiari project. They are due back just before Christmas.


Oct 9, 2011

CISA3 IGERT Archaeology Paper in Press


CISA3 associate director Tom Levy reports from Jordan that he and IGERT Trainee Ian Jones are co-authors with Stephen Savage of Arizona State of a paper now in press at the Journal of Archaeological Science. "As another benchmark for our NSF IGERT program at Calit2," writes Levy, the paper concerns "hyperspectral imagining of ancient slag deposits in the Faynan district." Savage -- a CISA3/IGERT associate -- spearheaded the paper.


Oct 7, 2011

IGERT-TEECH and Ethics in Engineering

As part of the inaugural created by CISA3 as part of the NSF-funded IGERT project on cultural heritage diagnostics, the director of the Research Ethics Program at UCSD gave a lecture to IGERT graduate students on October 4 at UCSD. Michael Kalichman is also an affiliated faculty member of the IGERT-TEECH program.


Sep 1, 2011

UCSD Team Leads Search for Lost Da Vinci Painting

KGTV Channel 10, the ABC affiliate in San Diego, reports on the latest efforts by a team from UCSD's CISA3 center to locate the Battle of Anghiari, a mural missing for more than four centuries. Click on link at 10News to watch a Flash video.