Knapp Lecture for the Centre of the Study of the Bible in Oriel College

Please see attached and below, courtesy of Hindy Najman

Knapp Lecture for the Centre of the Study of the Bible in Oriel College this coming Tuesday (2/25)  at 5 p.m.  The speakers are Mladen Popović and Maruf Dhali.

Combining AI, the Sciences and the Humanities to Innovate the Study
of Ancient Handwritten Manuscripts
 
Here are bios for our speakers: 

Prof. Mladen Popović is the Dean of the Faculty of Religion, Culture, and Society at the University of Groningen. He has been principal investigator of the ERC project The Hands That Wrote the Bible and co-directed the NWO/FWO project Models of Textual Communities and Digital Palaeography of the Dead Sea Scrolls with Eibert Tigchelaar. His current work integrates AI technology with scientific methods (chemical analysis and radiocarbon dating) and traditional humanities approaches (palaeography, history, and philology) to study ancient documents on leather and papyrus such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is editor of the Journal for the Study of Judaism and serves on the editorial boards of Dead Sea Discoveries, Journal of Biblical Literature, Oudtestamentische Studiën/Old Testament Studies, and Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism. He was curator of a major Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition in the Drents Museum, Assen, together with the Israel Antiquities Authority in 2013/2014. He is an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

Dr. Maruf A. Dhali is currently working as an Assistant Professor in Artificial Intelligence at Bernoulli Institute. He joined the university in 2016 as a Ph.D. researcher in the multidisciplinary ERC project The Hands that Wrote the Bible on analyzing the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 2021, he joined the Department of AI as a Lecturer. He received his M.Sc. degree (with distinction) in Computer Vision and Robotics from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, in 2015. He was a recipient of the European Commission’s Erasmus Mundus Masters Scholarship. During his studies, he attended the University of Burgundy, France; the University of Girona, Spain; and the University of Edinburgh, the UK. His research interests include computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. He appeared in numerous news outlets for his works, including BBC News, ABC Australia, Independent, Live Science, Euro News, etc. In addition, he has been an invited speaker/ guest lecturer to several symposiums at different universities worldwide, including the University of Basel (Switzerland), NTNU (Norway), KU Leuven (Belgium), and University of Halle (Germany). He is also working on the €10 million NWO HAICu project for Dutch cultural heritage data.

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