Penn State research partnership opens Cypriot artifacts to the world

University Park, Pa. -- Thousands of ancient Cypriot artifacts, images and documents will soon be available to view and search online, thanks to a research partnership between Penn State and the Cyprus Institute.

Six Penn State researchers received a $250,000 EAGER grant from the National Science Foundation for the Iconic Image Analysis and Intelligent Search for Cypriot Artifacts project, which will build tools to enable online searches of ancient artifacts and images.

EAGER (Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research) are given by NSF to projects that support high-risk, exploratory and potentially transformative research.

"We hope to leverage the brain power in both countries to preserve the artistic and cultural heritage in Cyprus," said James Wang, associate professor of information sciences and technology and the project's principal investigator.

Other researchers in the project are: Lee Giles, David Reese professor of information sciences and technology; Prasenjit Mitra, assistant professor of information sciences and technology; Loukas Kalisperis, professor of architecture; Dean Snow, professor of anthropology, and Mike Halm, director of Penn State's WebLion group. They will work in collaboration with the Cyprus Institute, a nonprofit science and technology research institution founded in 2007.

The project is among the first to be funded under the recently signed International Collaboration Agreement on Science and Technology between the U.S. and Cyprus. Researchers will begin cataloging digitized images and artifacts and hope to have a live digital library and search engine completed within two years.

"It's a high-risk, high-return situation," Wang said. "There are language barriers to overcome and a project like this has never been done before between the U.S. and Cyprus, but the potential benefit to the general public is enormous."

If successful, Mitra said the tools developed in this effort could be used on other ancient cultures.

"Cyprus is certainly not the only culture where these artifacts exist," he said. "We hope this project can serve as a prototype for future work in this area."