19th International Congress of Classical Archaeology took place in Cologne and Bonn from May 22nd to May 26th. The ICCA is one of the most important meetings of the discipline and takes place every five years.
The conference was a great opportunity for the ArchAIDE Team to also hold their regular general meeting and to present the ArchAIDE project to a professional audience.
The venerable Art Nouveau lecture room of the Akademisches Kunstmuseum formed a great setting for our workshop. To get the best possible outcome of the workshop the team decided to split the event into an informative first part and a trial phase. In this phase, the audience was able to test our classification app with samples of Maiolica of Montelupo.
The workshop program:
The subsequent discussion focussed on the sustainability of the project as well as on possibilities of participation.
The audience approved of reducing the trial material to only three ceramic classes: Amphorae, Terra Sigillata and Majolica as sufficient for proof of concept to transfer on other ceramic classifications even outside the classical archaeological world (eg. South America).
Colleagues interested in participating in the project can register on the project's associates platform. The possibility of participating in data exchange or crowdsourcing by using the app is still being discussed.
After the discussion, the audience was keen on testing the app that helps classify pottery with the provided mobile devices. The system is able to detect and classify the decoration on Majolica of Montelupo and gives the user a ranked result. The colleagues were very impressed by the results and the positive hit rate.
This short try out of the app by people outside the project gave us valuable feedback on the usability and design of the app that will be incorporated into the next version of the system.
The verbal feedback by listeners was very positive as well. The overall opinion is that the work on ArchAIDE is very important because using mobile devices to classify artefacts will becommonplace in short future. Furthermore, it was stated that the EU's funding of research and basic work in this field is very important and perspective. These observations, as well as the constructive discussion during the workshop, encourage the ArchAIDE team to carry on.
The verbal feedback by listeners was very positive as well. The overall opinion is that the work on ArchAIDE is very important because using mobile devices to classify artefacts will be commonplace in short future. Furthermore, it was stated that the EU's funding of research and basic work in this field is very important and perspective. These observations, as well as the constructive discussion during the workshop, encourage the ArchAIDE team to carry on.
