1.00 PM, WEDNESDAY 11 FEBRUARY IN THE SEMINAR ROOM, ARCHWAY WEST FUILDING Title: Viewing Ancient Rock Art with Inexpensive Computers and Cameras Speaker: Russell A. Kirsch, National Institute of Standards and Technology Abstract: The best source of information on the status of human consciousness over time is found in the record of what we call the visual arts. And the oldest such records are in the form of paintings and engravings made on rock surfaces. The ubiquity of rock art throughout the world challenges us to record it before it is destroyed by depradations from humans and the environment. Recently it has become possible to enlist personal computers and 35 mm cameras in recording and even discovering such records. With scanned images in the computer, we can see aspects of the rock art record that were heretofore invisible to ordinary viewing. We will show how we have used the Macintosh and stereophotography to enhance ancient rock engravings and also to provide interactive video-like site views from still photographs. About the speaker: Mr. Russell A. Kirsch received his scientific training from the Bronx High School of Science, graduating in 1946. Subsequent refinements occurred at New York University (B.E.E. 1950), Harvard University (S.M. 1952), American University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a member of the group that first designed and built digital computers in the U.S. Federal Government at the National Bureau of Standards where he was responsible for computer design, operation, training, programming, and research for thirty three years beginning in 1951. He retired as head of Artificial Intelligence research in 1985 to become Director of Research of the Sturvil Corporation, a non-profit public interest corporation active in government information research and in computers in the fine arts. He also still maintains an affiliation with NBS. Over the years he has collaborated with U.S. Government agencies to design and introduce computers into the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Energy, Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, State, Treasury and many independent agencies. He is finally convinced that the operation of the Federal Government is a mystery. He published the results of his research in papers that started the computer fields of Image Processing, Syntactic Pattern Recognition, and Chemical Structure Searching. He was among the early workers in the use of computers in Natural Language Processing, Library Science,Time Sharing, Biomedicine, Artificial Intelligence, and Security Printing. He is a past Advisory Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and currently Advisory Editor of the journal Languages of Design. He has been chair of various conferences on Pattern Recognition and Image Processing and Artificial Intelligence. He is a member of the Assoc. for Computing Machinery, a Life Member of the IEEE, and a Fellow of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science He has been an invited lecturer at many scientific organizations and universities in the USA, Japan, England, France, Italy, Netherlands, and Australia. His current research interests are mainly in the use of computers in the fine arts and in studying ancient petroglyphs. With his wife, Joan L. Kirsch, an art historian and printmaker (whom he courted while they were inside the first computer) he has been collaborating on research to teach computers part of what we know about recognizing style in paintings. He feels that the computer is an adequately expressive medium not only for making new art, but, rather, for expressing what we know about existing art and doing so in such a way as to enable our insights to be tested the way scientific theories are usually tested.