Briefs

UC Riverside project will track the evolution of shapes of ancient artifacts

July 22, 2008. RIVERSIDE, Calif. (www.ucr.edu) -- The National Science Foundation has awarded $805,000 to support a three-year UC Riverside project that will analyze Native American artifacts, with modern data mining techniques.

Professors from the Bourns College of Engineering will bring their data mining and pattern recognition skills. Sang-Hee Lee, an associate professor of anthropology in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences will provide knowledge of ancient people. Together, they will build a tool to track the spread of cultural artifacts, such as petroglyphs/pictographs (rock art), projectile points (arrowheads), and ceramics.

The project is called "Tools to Mine and Index Trajectories of Physical Artifacts."

"By taking advantage of the recent advances in data-mining and indexing, a massive amount of useful information can potentially be extracted from the anthropological resources that abound in North America," said Eamonn Keogh, principal investigator and associate professor of computer science and engineering. He will work with Prof. Vassilis Tsotras and Prof. Dimitrios Gunopulos, both from computer science and engineering.

Read more.