You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.

I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

Today's speakers did something rather remarkable.

They used advanced AI and computer vision to virtually unroll ancient scrolls,

buried long ago by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Machine learning researcher Yusuf Mohamed Nettor and digital archaeologist Julian Schilliger

shed light on their approach and explain how AI can open up new

possibilities for understanding ancient knowledge. We always think about the potential of AI

changing the future. But what about the potential of AI changing the past?

My name is Yusuf Nader.

I'm an Egyptian AI researcher and a PhD student at the Free University in Berlin.

And last year, I led the Vizuvius Grand Prize winning team

on exploring this very question.

You see, the story starts almost 2,000 years ago.

A Greek philosopher that we believe was Philodemus of Gadara sat in one of the many rooms of the Villa de Papiri.

He talked about music, he talked about pleasure, it talked about what make things enjoyable,

questions that still plague us until today. One of his scribes wrote down his thoughts on sheets

of papyrus. The sheets were rolled and stowed away for later generations. Fast forward,

150 years, not even more, Mount Vizuvius erupts, burying Herculaneum, the villa, and the words of the philosopher under a sea of hot mud and ashes.

Now fast forward again to the 17th century. People are excavating around the area.

They found beautiful statues, breathtaking frescoes, and some weird-looking pieces of charcoal.

This is when the first scrolls were discovered, and people were racing to excavate more of these.

...