Latest news with #Latin
NDTV
an hour ago
- Science
- NDTV
Google's New AI Can Read Ancient Roman Inscriptions; Historians Call It "Jaw-Dropping"
Google DeepMind has introduced a new artificial intelligence tool called Aeneas, designed to assist historians in studying ancient Roman inscriptions, according to a report by The Guardian. The tool helps identify the origin and date of the inscriptions and suggests missing words in damaged or incomplete texts. Aeneas, named after the Trojan hero from Roman mythology, was developed in collaboration with historians, including Dr Thea Sommerschield from the University of Nottingham. The AI was trained on a database of nearly 200,000 Latin inscriptions, containing more than 16 million characters. The inscriptions, found on monuments, tombs, and even everyday items, are valuable records of life in ancient Rome. However, many are fragmented or worn, making them difficult to interpret. Aeneas analyses the text and sometimes images from an inscription and compares it with similar examples from the 7th century BC to the 8th century AD. It uses deeper linguistic and historical patterns, not just keyword matches, to find connections, according to The Guardian. The AI can determine the likely Roman province where an inscription was created and estimate its date within about 13 years. It also proposes possible words to fill in missing parts, tested so far on texts where the original wording is already known. In tests, Aeneas provided accurate insights into famous inscriptions such as the Res Gestae Divi Augusti and linked similar texts across different regions of the Roman Empire. Historians called the tool "transformative," with 23 researchers finding it useful in 90% of cases. Experts believe Aeneas will open new opportunities in the study of Latin inscriptions, making it easier for more people to contribute to historical research without needing access to rare materials or deep prior expertise. However, scholars emphasise the importance of using the tool thoughtfully and critically.
Mint
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
DJ Snake is coming back to India! Check out tour schedule, cities, date, venue and ticket prices
French DJ and music producer DJ Snake is all set to return to India for the third time, as part of a six-city Sunburn Arena tour scheduled for later this year. Known for chart-toppers like Loco Contigo, Magenta Riddim and Taki Taki, the Grammy-nominated artist will perform in cities across the country starting this September. The tour will begin in Kolkata on September 26, followed by shows in Hyderabad (September 27), Bengaluru September 28), Pune ( October 3), Mumbai ( October 4), and will conclude in Delhi-NCR on October 5. Speaking about his much-anticipated return, DJ Snake said, 'The passion and the love in India – it all hits different. I still remember the energy during my last visit with thousands of voices singing every word back to me; It was pure madness! It's the way the crowd gives everything they've got. Every time I come back, that connection feels so deep. See you soon India!" The artist's upcoming album Nomad is also expected to release this September. DJ Snake, whose real name is William Sami Etienne Grigahcine, is known for his dynamic sets that fuse trap, hip-hop, pop, Latin beats, and Indian influences. Earlier this year, he made history at the Stade de France by becoming the biggest solo electronic artist, with over 100,000 tickets sold within minutes. The sold-out performance was followed by a high-energy afterparty at the Accor Arena. Welcoming the artist back, Karan Singh, CEO of Sunburn, said, 'DJ Snake's return to India for his third Sunburn Arena tour speaks to the incredible demand and the unique bond he has built with India over the years. It's been great to work with him over the years and it's truly heartening to see artists of his stature come back to perform and to larger crowds each time."* He added, 'At Sunburn, our goal has always been to champion India as a top destination for global talent by delivering world-class experiences. This tour reminds us of how far we've come in shaping the country's EDM landscape and the belief our fans place in us is what keeps us going. With lots in store, this one is set to be truly special." DJ Snake first gained recognition in 2013 with his debut single Turn Down for What, a collaboration with Lil Jon, released under Mad Decent, an imprint of Columbia Records. The song reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and went on to receive an octuple platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of America. It was also nominated for Best Music Video at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards and won Top Dance/Electronic Song at the 2015 Billboard Music Awards. Before rising to global fame, he worked behind the scenes producing tracks for artists such as Pitbull (Shut It Down) and Lady Gaga (Applause). His debut studio album Encore featured the top-five Billboard hit Let Me Love You, while his second album Carte Blanche included the global smash Taki Taki and peaked at number 48 on the Billboard 200. In 2014, he joined Skrillex's summer Mothership Tour alongside Dillon Francis, and in 2018, Billboard ranked him ninth on their Dance 100 list of top dance musicians.
India Today
5 hours ago
- Science
- India Today
Google DeepMind unveils Aeneas AI model, claims it can decipher ancient inscriptions in seconds
Google DeepMind has recently introduced the Aeneas model, a new approach in historical research that utilises artificial intelligence to aid the interpretation of ancient Roman inscriptions. Developed in partnership with leading universities, Aeneas accelerates the process by which historians can identify textual "parallels" in Latin is adept at processing fragmentary or damaged inscriptions, providing historians with newfound capabilities to contextualise ancient texts. While the model primarily focuses on Latin, there is potential for adaptation to other ancient languages, expanding its reach further. This adaptability promises to enhance historical inquiry across different cultures and Aeneas is tailored to work with inscriptions that often lack comprehensive contextual details. By leveraging a combination of textual and visual data, the model can offer insights into Roman life and society. According to the blogpost, Google claims that this model achieves a 73 per cent accuracy rate in restoring gaps within inscriptions up to ten characters long, and a notable capability for dating texts, placing them within 13 years of historians' estimates. These capabilities make it a vital tool for exploring the Roman world through various inscriptions, from political graffiti to business model has been tested on the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, a famous Roman inscription attributed to Emperor Augustus. Aeneas provided a distribution of possible dates, capturing different prevailing hypotheses in a quantitative manner. This demonstrates the model's ability to transform historical questions into a probabilistic framework, offering historians a new approach to longstanding debates. The use of "embeddings" helps in drawing connections, allowing historians to uncover deeper insights into historical excels in geographical attribution through a multimodal generative neural network that analyses both text and images. Utilising the Latin Epigraphic Dataset (LED) with over 1,76,000 inscriptions, Aeneas offers a more precise grouping of texts by date than other models. This integration of AI into historical workflows exemplifies the synergy between machine learning and expert knowledge, fostering a collaborative research model is accessible through an interactive platform available to researchers and educators, aligning with initiatives to improve AI literacy. Aeneas supports the restoration of inscriptions with unknown gap lengths, a critical feature for managing severely damaged texts. Its ability to search for "parallels" enriches the understanding of Roman society and its geographical expanse, significantly enhancing historical in collaboration with the University of Nottingham, and partners from the Universities of Warwick, Oxford, and Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), Aeneas represents a concerted effort to harness AI for historical research. This collaboration highlights a broader initiative to enable historians to identify and interpret parallels at scale, providing starting points for inquiry and developers are committed to enhancing the model's versatility through a new teaching syllabus designed to integrate technical skills with historical analysis. This initiative supports AI literacy and aligns with European educational frameworks, providing educational resources that bridge technical and historical Aeneas becomes an integral part of historical research, its capabilities in processing multimodal inputs and restoring texts of unknown length will prove indispensable. By transforming historical analysis into a more quantitative and interpretable process, Aeneas promises to unlock new perspectives on ancient societies, ensuring that the legacies of past civilisations can be explored and understood in innovative ways.- EndsMust Watch
Perth Now
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
See the heights Lin-Manuel Miranda reached pre-Hamilton
Before the global blockbuster Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the musical In the Heights. Miranda's debut musical won four Tony Awards, including best musical, during its 2008 Broadway run, as well as a Grammy, and was adapted into feature film. For most people, that would be regarded as an extraordinary achievement, but such is the scale of Lin Manuel Miranda's success that In the Heights is often explained as "the one before Hamilton". Inspired by the Manhattan neighbourhood of Washington Heights near where he grew up, the score features hip-hop, salsa and Latin beats, and tells the story of an immigrant community wondering about the meaning of home. After a sold-out run at the Sydney Opera House in 2024, the musical opens in Melbourne in August, followed by shows on the Gold Coast in September. Ryan Gonzalez stars as Dominican-American Usnavi, who is trapped running a bodega but hopes for a simpler life in the Dominican Republic, while Olivia Vasquez stars as Vanessa. In The Heights is at Melbourne's Comedy Theatre from August 1 to September 6 followed by Home Of The Arts on the Gold Coast from September 12 to 24.
The Herald Scotland
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
What I found when I revisited the Barras after decades away
And there were swaggers of young men, hair slick and wavy with Brylcreem, brimming with attitude in their white sports coats, their chiselled jaws forged not in gyms but in coalmines, steelworks and shipyards. And arm-in-arm with last night's lumber. This is where we would come on Sunday afternoons in the advent weeks running up to Christmas. Where else could a single modest wage help Santa fulfil his annual responsibilities to five young children? It didn't matter that the toys' shelf-life was shorter than the wrapping paper in which they came, but that they out-lasted the school holidays. Read More: It was amidst this throng between wooden barrows laden with garments and jewellery and 'fancy goods' where I first got lost. I still recall that initial terror that comes with being marooned among strangers beyond the protective gaze of mum and dad. And then being rescued by an elderly woman with a black shawl and brown, leathery features who spoke kindly to me in a funny accent full of zs and ks and sat me down beside her stall; experience telling her that my parents would soon retrace their steps and find me here. And now, for the first time in many decades I'm back here at the invitation of Sarah Campbell, The Herald's Food and Drink specialist. Ms Campbell is telling me about the recent 'street food' and 'artisan' vibe that has begun to curl around this old place. She's a full generation younger than me, but knows these alleyways well and all their culinary vestibules. And the stallholders all seem to know her. I'm impressed. Anything billed as 'artisan' often induces a nameless terror in me: of pony-tailed and red corduroyed hipsters frenchifying comestibles you can pick up in Lidl and charging an extra fiver for it; of soy lattes and other formless elixirs served by the barista elites. Perhaps, she's sensed my initial reticence and so perhaps that's why she's chosen a wee outlet called Colombian Bites to commence our culinary peregrination through the Barras market. Colombian Bites at the Barras (Image: Robert Perry) It's about the size of a garden shed and is squeezed in between wider and louder emporiums on Moncur Street, but the queue that has begun to form there hints at the treats to come. It's owned by Ana Orsino and Andres Moya whose Facebook page tells me that that this is their love letter to Colombia and the Latin spirit which lives in both of us. They specialise in Arepas and Empanadas, which I may have tasted once or twice in Tex Mex … or maybe that's me wretchedly indulging in an ethno-gastro form of profiling. Empanadas, I've heard of, but if I have previously eaten one it wasn't like this. I'd have remembered this. Ms Campbell has recommended a chicken empanada. You're tempted to describe its casing as a 'wrap' as though it's one of those tuna preparations you get in a Tesco meal-deal and in which you could wrap spanners. This one though, is as fine as tissue paper so that it doesn't detract from the layers of meat. You want to describe it as 'tightly-packed', but it's too delicate for that. One of them is just about enough; two at a single sitting would be disrespectful. And then we delve into the Barras' old, thin, busy boulevards and the stalls and the barrows of my youth still laden with Aladdin's cast-offs. I can't resist telling Ms Campbell about this wider neighbourhood and all of its connectedness to my family. She listens politely, but when I get like this I'm like a two-bob tour guide and so I give her leave to shut me up at any moment. I was baptised just up the road from here at St Anne's in Dennistoun, where my mum's side of the family all lived when they'd got off then boat from Ireland. I recount a night in the Barrowland ballroom at a Pogues concert where my brothers and cousins and their friends defended the honour of a young female in their company with extreme prejudice when a drunken suitor and his psycho pals were coming the wide men. The Barras (Image: Newsquest) And I tell her about my daughter, a sustainable gashio designer who had a studio in the middle of the Barras and how proud I was that she had restored a family link to this neighbourhood stretching back five generations. Ms Campbell isn't having any of the gentrification stuff. 'You can't really gentrify a place like this,' she says. 'The street food is real and it's of a high quality made by people who know what they're doing. But the Barras will always be the Barras.' Read More: She's right, of course. The sights and sounds rising up from these wynds come from a dozen different cultures, but this is nothing new. This place once provided sanctuary and safe spaces for my people and their alien culture and now it's doing so again. The food is an extension of these groups, their gifts to us, in which they've placed something of themselves and their lands. Later, we head for Ho Lee Fook, the Hong Kong street food shack directly opposite the Barrowland Ballroom on the corner of MacFarlane Street and the Gallowgate. The literal translation of Ho Lee Fook is 'Good, wealth and luck.' It's also my inward response when I bite into one of their pork burgers. I want to ask if they'd consider opening sister outlets called 'Mon Tae' and 'Take a Runnin', but these might not have a direct Chinese translation. Ms Campbell believes this place offers just about the best street food in the city. 'You'd be amazed how far people will travel to visit this place,' she says. I've not come from very far away, but Ho Lee Fook is the main reason why I make a return solo visit the following week. Ho Lee Fook (Image: Robert Perry) I also want to take a more leisurely wander through the old Barras. These streets were absolutely rammed with people when I'd walked round with Ms Campbell and even more so on my return visit. I turn right at Kent Street just beside Mexica Express and across from the Saracen Head tavern. Many years ago, en route to a Celtic game, I'd watched a barman pour White Lightning cocktails directly into the mouths of a row of punters, this being their first drink of the day and thus the one that would stiffen their shaky hands. Just inside the first lane there's a wee old boy with a fez and a beard, looking like he's just taken the long route back from a Grateful Dead concert in 1969. There's a stall selling Polish dumplings. I have to forgo these delights though as I need to leave some room for those Ho Lee Fookin bang bang prawns and crispy katsu chicken. The local vernacular is at full ramming speed today. 'You alright, ma man,' I'm asked by the Gallowgate Hippie. 'Aye, it's all good,' I say, and we chat about how great the atmosphere is. 'Nice talkin' to you, bud,' he says. 'Lookin' good, princess,' he says to a handsome woman looking for baby clothes across the way. She giggles and then he winks at me. A young couple walk by, speaking French. 'Are youze from Germany,' another old chap asks them. 'Do you know ma mate Klaus, he used to live up the Garngad. Some team that Bayern Munich, by the way. In every nook, there are tables selling collectable vinyls and picture discs. Bob Marley is singing 'Exodus, movement of Ja People.' The elderly woman behind the table next to me is wearing what appears to be her wedding dress from the last century and I feel a tenderness for her that I can't quite explain. In small wooden kiosks and pavilions there are old coins, old hats, old mirrors, old cards. You wouldn't use this place as a backdrop to a movie location; you'd use the movie as a backdrop to the Barras. The Barras (Image: Newsquest) I walk down to Colombian Bites and this time the queue is nudging the opposite side of the street. Today is Colombian Independence Day and along with his tostadas and his empanadas and his arepas, Andres is providing a free Salsa dance lesson. Some couples are taking him up on his kind offer, sashaying and swaying in the Glasgow sunshine. 'One, two three ... five, six, seven, Clap your hands, side to side.' Ms Campbell should be glad she's not here, because I'd have been up there like a shot. Round the corner and there's your luxury dog's chocolates. A human couple appears to be tasting the goods somewhat, which is top, top marketing. And there's your Monster Munchies, billed as 'The Barras Hutch for good food'. Under a sign that reads 'F*** the Diet' there's lively bill of fayre: Irn Bru chilli; loaded salt and chilli fries, Monster Munchie Box And look, here's a pavilion selling holy pictures and statues and crucifixes. I purchase a statue of Padre Pio, the old saint who had the gift of being in two places at the one time. It sparks another childhood memory: of my old school football coach, Charlie Higgins and his lifelong devotion to Padre Pio. When I'd told him that the Italian holy man would have been decent at football with a gift like that, Mr Higgins had become cross. 'You could be in six places at the one time, McKenna and you'd still never be anywhere near the flamin' ball." It's owned by Rebecca and Sandra. I tell them it's great to see the Barras jumping again. 'This place is vital to the local community,' says Sandra. 'It helps young entrepreneurs to get a wee shot at running their own businesses without having to pay the expensive High Street rents. 'Rebecca's dad died two years ago and both she and I have found solace here. It's been an escape. You can't not be happy among these people.'
