Priyank Aranke wins PHerc. 211 First Letters Prize

Priyank Aranke won the $50K First Letters Prize for deciphering letters on PHerc. 211, a papyrus from the Herculaneum collection at the National Library of Naples. Using a residual 3D U-Net ink model trained on high-resolution data distilled from other scrolls via a 3D DINO embedding approach, Aranke successfully revealed eleven readable letters within a four-centimeter region. Open article →