Speakers

	Gregory Bearman Until he retired in 2008, Dr. Bearman was a Principal Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena CA. At JPL he managed groups that developed new technologies and instruments for remote sensing and planetary surface exploration, with the emphasis on innovation and development of new sensors and spectral imagers. In 1993, in collaboration with the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center, his group was the first to apply spectroscopy and modern digital electronic imaging to the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was the first to demonstrate and explain why infrared imaging of ancient texts improves legibility. Since 1994, Dr. Bearman has made five working trips to Jerusalem to image scrolls and other artifacts or to provide expertise in imaging to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). He is Consultant to the IAA for Imaging Technologies of the Dead Sea Scrolls project to reimage all of the scrolls and put indexed images online for universal access. Although trained in atomic physics, much of his work over the last 15 years has been in photonics technologies for biomedical purposes. Recent biomedical research includes clinical applications of retinal imaging spectroscopy in collaboration with Doheny Eye Institute and University of Southern California-Keck School of Medicine. Dr. Bearman’s collaboration with the Scott Fraser group at Caltech led to development of the Zeiss Meta spectral detector for confocal microscopy, which received an R&D 100 Award in 2002. This work has significantly affected fluorescence microscopy; every maker of confocal microscopes now sells some version of the technology. Dr. Bearman has been a visiting scientist at the St. Lukes Hospital in Houston and Cedar-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. At present he has an adjunct appointment in the Ophthalmology Dept at the USC Keck School of Medicine. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Biomedical Optics and for many years was organizer of the annual SPIE conference on Biomedical Imaging Spectroscopy. He has more than 100 publications and eight patents.
	Uwe Bergmann Uwe Bergmann is a Senior Scientist at the Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where he is the Deputy Director of the Linac Coherent Light Source, the world's first free electron X-ray laser. Before joining SLAC he has worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. He carried out his thesis research at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source, and holds a Ph.D. in physics from Stony Brook University, New York, which he received in 1994. His research focuses on the development and application of novel x-ray techniques including, scattering, spectroscopy and imaging. His x-ray scattering and spectroscopy work has included the study of the structure of water and the photosynthetic splitting of water to molecular oxygen. His x-ray imaging work has focused on ancient documents, including the Archimedes Palimpsest, medical studies and, more recently, the study of fossils.
	Alan Bowman Alan Bowman is Camden Professor of Ancient History, Director for the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and Fellow of Brasenose College. His research interests focus on papyrology, the Vindolanda Writing-tablets, and the social and economic history of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt and the Roman Empire. His publications include The Town Councils of Roman Egypt (1971), Literacy and power in the ancient world (1994), ed. with G.D.Woolf, Egypt after the Pharaohs (2nd ed. 1996), The Vindolanda Writing-tablets (Tabulae Vindolandenses II - III ) (1994-2003), with J.D.Thomas, Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier: Vindolanda and its People (rev.ed. 2006). In addition to his work on the Roman Economy, current research projects include further work on the Vindolanda tablets and on Oxyrhynchus Papyri, image-enhancement of damaged documents and the construction of a Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities.
	Markus Brantl Dr. Markus Brantl is the Head of the Munich Digitization Center/Digital Library at Bavarian State Library (BSB). From 1997 he worked at Bavarian State Library as project manager at the newly founded Munich Digitization Center and from 1986 to 1996 as programmer and research/academic assistant with focus on “Historical Computer Science” at the Auxiliary Siences of History Department of the University at Munich. Markus Brantl`s main interest are applied research projects in the Digital Library area: e.g. mass digitization, digital long-term preservation and 3D. Today the Munich Digitization Center of the BSB provides the largest and fastest growing digital collection (from 6th to 21th century) and long-term archive of Germany (February 2010: 325 million files in 195 Terabytes).
	Majlis Bremer-Laamanen Majlis Bremer-Laamanen is Director of the Centre for Preservation and Digitisation at the National Library of Finland. She has been Project Leader and Work Package Leader in several national and international projects. Some of the onging memberships: National: National Digital Library: Availability Section, The National Library Management Group, Mikkeli University Consortium Management group. International ones: IFLA Newspaper Section, EU Member States´ Expert group on Digitisation and Digital Preservation. 004-05, EU Member States´ Expert group on Digitisation and Digital Preservation.
	Adam Bülow-Jacobsen Former Research Professor of papyrology in Copenhagen. Apart from editorial work, I have always done my own restoration. I have over forty years of experience in photography of manuscripts, papyri, inscriptions, and ostraca, mostly on large-format negatives. I have taken photographs i.a. for the Oxyrhynchus series and for the AIP archive, in the Cairo Museum, in Oxford, in Oslo, in Copenhagen and Lund and many thousands of ostraca from our 23 years of excavations in Egypt, using large negatives, 120, 35mm, colour, infrared and panchromatic film and now, of course, digital. The greatest revelation has been digital infrared.
	William A. Christens-Barry William A. Christens-Barry is a physicist specializing in optical measurement, imaging, and spectroscopic techniques. At the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory he developed optical, spectroscopic, and imaging techniques that could be applied to plantary data from spaceborne platforms and to engineered and biological materials. At the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine he applied these studies with collaborators investigating breast cancer, prostate cancer, and pediatric neurosurgery. This work was funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Eye Institute. Dr. Christens-Barry founded Equipoise Imaging, LLC in 2000, where he adapted several of these optical measurement and imaging techniques for use in investigations of cultural heritage objects. He initiated new spectral imaging techniques and instruments as a principal scientific member of the Archimedes Palimpsest. In particular, he proposed and implemented the spectral imaging approach based on narrowband illumination provided by LED’s. In 2007, Equipoise Imaging formed an alliance with MegaVision, Inc. to extend this approach beyond “discovery” investigations to the field of fine art reproduction. Dr. Christens-Barry has taken a central role in numerous imaging, optical analysis, and spectral imaging projects. Notable work includes: confocal microscopic analyses of the Star-Spangled Banner at NMAH; spectral imaging of palimpsests and illuminated manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum and St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt; spectral imaging, processing, and reproduction of numerous maps and the Nicolay draft of the Gettysburg Address at the Library of Congress; imaging of the Oxyrhynchus papyrii at the University of Oxford; spectral imaging of artworks at several major American museums. A recent archeological investigation applied spectral imaging to early-Pueblan pictographs in the American southwest with National Park Service and USGS scientists. Dr. Christens-Barry has authored numerous journal articles and research presentations. He is the inventor of several patented instruments and techniques, with several other patent applications pending.
	Daniel Deckers Daniel Deckers coordinates a centre for Greek manuscript and textual research at the University of Hamburg (Teuchos. Zentrum für Handschriften- und Textforschung), where his work includes high-resolution and special case imaging of manuscripts in addition to textual research as well as digital philology. His research interests include literary evidence on aspects of the writing process in antiquity, and the application of digital imaging to manuscripts. He has been working on projects for the recovery of erased texts in Greek palimpsests since 2002 and personally carried out imaging campaigns in 11 European libraries. More recently, he initiated a cooperation with the Hamburger Synchrotronstrahlungslabor for the use of storage ring x-ray fluorescence in the imaging of palimpsest texts.
	Roger L. Easton, Jr. Dr. Easton has been on the faculty of the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology since 1986. His original fields of interest included digital and optical holography and digital and optical image/signal processing, but he has worked in the field of imaging of historical artifacts since the mid-1990s. At that time, a collaboration was formed with the late Dr. Robert Johnston and Dr. Keith Knox to process images of the Temple Scroll and to image fragments of other Dead Sea Scrolls. In 2000, he was selected as leader of the imaging team for the Archimedes Palimpsest project; the team also included Dr. Knox and Dr. William A. Christens-Barry. This effort to extract the erased original text from the palimpsest continued through 2008 and used a variety of imaging and image processing tools to extract readable text from the several original treatises of the manuscript. Among other projects, he currently is collaborating with Dr. Fenella France to use spectral imaging to enhance the visibility of paper watermarks. Dr. Easton is the author of the book “Fourier Methods in Imaging,” with publication expected in 2010. He was awarded the Professor Raymond C. Bowman Award in 1997 from the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1997 and shared the 1998 Archie Mahan Prize from the Optical Society of America with Dr. Johnston and Dr. Knox.
	Kai Ekholm Ph.D. Kai Ekholm has been the Director of the National Library of Finland since the year 2002. He received the honorary title of Professor in 2004. In the spring 2009, the Board of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) nominated Ekholm as the Chairman of FAIFE (Committee on Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression) for the term 2009–2011. During his career, he has written over 20 books on electronic publication and censorship.
	Fenella G. France Dr. Fenella G. France is the leading US scientist in the field of applying advanced spectral imaging technologies for the conservation and preservation of historic manuscripts. She is currently a senior preservation scientist at the US Library of Congress, Preservation Research and Testing Division (PRTD). Dr. France conducts spectral digital imaging studies of manuscripts and maps from the library collection using narrow-band illumination from the ultraviolet through the visible and infrared spectra. These include US Top Treasures, ranging from drafts of the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address to the Waldseemüller 1507 World Map, and other significant international objects. She is also responsible for the application of advanced sensor systems to monitor the condition of Top Treasure manuscripts for viewing and further study, and making data about these manuscripts and their preservation available to the public. Dr. France received her Ph.D from Otago University (1995) in Dunedin, New Zealand, and a MBA from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia (1999). She was invited to join the Smithsonian Institute Star-Spangled Banner Project as preservation scientist, with research defining the long-term exhibition and preservation of the historic flag. Dr. France specializes in research to minimize environmental deterioration, including for the Star-Spangled Banner Project, Ellis Island Immigration Center, World Trade Center Archive, and the Museum of Natural History. She has worked on international committees on the development of standards for cultural heritage lighting and exhibition.
	Jaakko Frösén Jaakko Frösén is professor of (ancient) Greek philology at the University of Helsinki. He wrote his linguistic dissertation 'Prolegomena to a Study of the Greek Language of the First Centuries AD' in 1974 and has since then done his research work mostly on publishing and interpreting Greek papyri from Egypt from between the 4th century BC and 8th century AD, both documentary and literary. He became famous by combining the traditional philological study with conservation of difficult material, like papyri of mummy cartonnages (Helsinki, Vienna, London, Budapest) and carbonized papyrus scrolls (Vienna, Cologne, Athens, Amman). During the last decade he has been working mainly on Greek documentary archive (6th century AD) in Petra, Jordan. Carbonized scrolls were found by American archaeologists and saved, opened and conserved by Prof. Frösén and his Finnish team. The research center directed by Jaakko Frösén at the University of Helsinki has been nominated as a Center of Excellence in Research 2000–2011 by the Academy of Finland. One important project of the Center of Excellence is the digitizing of the medieval Greek manuscripts housed in the Library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria.
	Angelika Garz Angelika Garz is a research assistant within the Sinaitic Glagolitic Sacramentary (Euchologium) Fragments project funded by the Austria Science Fund (FWF). She works at the Institute of Computer Aided Automation at the Vienna University of Technology where she specialized in digital image processing during her studies of computer science in media. Her research interests focus on document analysis, texture-based image analysis, local descriptors and classifiers. Currently, she is finishing her master thesis which deals with the layout analysis of ancient manuscripts based on local descriptors and texture. She already presented preliminary results of her master thesis at international conferences.
	Trace A. Griffiths Trace A. Griffiths is a research assistant at the Information Dynamics Laboratory at Utah State University (Logan, Utah, USA) specializing in signal and image processing. He is currently applying signal processing algorithms to multispectral document images to enhance the legibility of the text and combine the multispectral information into one image. He has interned with the Brigham Young University Ancient Textual Imaging Group and has worked with many types of mediums including papyrus, parchment, carbonized papyri, velum, and rock art.
	Victor Karnaukhov Dr. Victor Karnaukhov is the Head of the Digital Image Processing Laboratory at the Kharkevich Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He received his Ph.D from the Institute for Information Transmission Problem of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russian Federation, 1986). His original fields of interest included digital holography, digital image processing and restoration. Currently, he has over two decades experience in studies of watermarks in medieval manuscripts, incunabula and other historical objects and documents. His research interests focus on development of the methods, tools, databases and application software for watermark acquisition, digitalization, processing, archiving and visualization. His investigations were done in cooperation with the leading European research groups in this area in the frameworks of a few successive international projects.
	Roger T. Macfarlane Roger T. Macfarlane is the director of the Ancient Textual imaging Group at Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah, USA). The other partners of the ATIG are Thomas Wayment (BYU Department of Ancient Scripture), Stephen Bay (BYU, Classics), and Greg Bearman (Snapshot Spectra). The Group manages the data captured from a decade of multispectral imaging projects involving the Herculaneum Papyri (Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli and The British Library), the Tebtunis Papyri (Center for the Tebtunis Papyri), and collections at the Austrian National Library, the University of Michigan, and Columbia University and others. A generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsors an extensive program in 2009-2011. The Group's primary focus is the application of multispectral imaging to damaged papyrological artifacts from antiquity, and its principle strength is uniting specialized imaging technology with the traditional papyrological investigation.
	Antti Nurminen Antti Nurminen is a research group manager of the Spatial Graphics and Interaction group of Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT (of Aalto University and University of Helsinki). He received his MSc in Engineering Physics from the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, in 1999, and PhD on Computer Sciences in 2009. He has led numerous industrial and academic technology research projects from high visibility showrooms with interactive large screen installations to mobile 3D maps. He has actively worked on digitization techniques on ancient documents since 1995.
	Michael Phelps Michael Phelps is Director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL), which promotes the development of innovative solutions for digitizing historical source materials and implements these solutions in selected international projects. In 2009, he directed a pilot project to apply spectral imaging to palimpsests at St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai, and is consulting with the National Centre of Manuscripts in Tbilisi, Georgia, to begin a long-term digitization program. In 1997 as Director of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in California, he managed one of the first projects to apply infrared digital imaging to Dead Sea Scrolls.
	Brent Seales Dr. Seales is the Gill Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments at the University of Kentucky. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin and was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, Sophia-Antipolis, France, before joining the Computer Science Department at the University of Kentucky. His research program is focused on digital imagery applied to challenges in surgical simulation and technology, visualization technology, and the digitization and digital restoration of antiquities. His research has been funded by agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the US Army. In addition to teaching and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students, over the past ten years he has developed a media and communications internship program focusing on telling stories about remarkable research efforts and achievements. These documentaries have aired internationally and cover a variety of interdisciplinary, innovative, technology-based projects.
	Ségolène Tarte Dr. Ségolène Tarte is currently a researcher at the Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, UK working on an inter-disciplinary project involving imaging sciences, information sciences and papyrology (http://esad.classics.ox.ac.uk/). She holds a MSc in Maths (Grenoble, F), and, with a PhD in Biomedical Engineering (Bern, CH), she went on to work at the Centre for Medical Image Computing, UCL, UK. Originally investing her knowledge of image processing and differential geometry in medical imaging, she is now exploring how such techniques can support papyrologists in reading ancient documents. An additional research focus of hers is the study, understanding and modelling of expert knowledge in the Humanities and, in particular, of how interpretations of artefacts arise. The ultimate aim of such study is to inform the design and development of software systems that will support the experts in their task. The methodologies she uses in this context are inspired and informed by anthropology, philosophy and the cognitive sciences. Drawing on her scientific background and investigating new research areas in the Social Sciences and in the Humanities roots her firmly in multi-disciplinary grounds. Her marked predilection for applications in the Arts and Humanities and Museum Studies makes her part of the growing Digital Humanities community.
	Michael B. Toth Michael B. Toth is the President and Chief Technology Officer of R.B.Toth Associates, which enables the use of new technologies for the study, preservation and display of cultural objects in museums and libraries. He brings over 25 years of experience with systems integration, program management and strategic planning as museums and libraries seek to capitalize on advances in information and digital imaging technology. This includes planning and managing the Archimedes and Galen Palimpsest Projects and Islamic Digital Resource at the Walters Art Museum, spectral imaging of the Waldseemüller 1507 World Map and drafts of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address at the Library of Congress, scientific studies of manuscripts in the Library of St. Catherine’s Monastery, and other advanced technical studies and integration efforts. Mike has supported and lectured in scientific and cultural institutions across the United States and Europe, and his work is cited in the book The Archimedes Codex. He has presented a range of papers on program and information management, spectral imaging, and the application of international standards to cultural heritage studies, as well as two Google Techtalks. In addition to his support for cultural institutions, Mike is also a consultant to major US government contractors on a range of technology applications and issues. He is a graduate of Wake Forest University, and lives in Oakton, Virginia.