The Million Dollar Vesuvius Challenge: Breakthroughs and Perspectives

In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius buried the Roman town of Herculaneum, and with it, an entire library of papyrus scrolls, carbonized into fragile black lumps that crumble the moment anyone tries to unroll them. For nearly 2,000 years, that library was considered unreadable and lost.

We are excited to welcome Giorgio Angelotti, Project Lead at the Vesuvius Challenge, to heidelberg.ai on September 22nd at 5 PM for an online session on reading these scrolls without ever opening them.

The Vesuvius Challenge is an open-science machine learning, computer vision, and geometry competition that uses high-resolution X-ray CT scanning to virtually unwrap the scrolls, reading the text still trapped inside. With cash prizes offered to researchers and hobbyists worldwide who crack pieces of the puzzle, the project has turned an ancient archaeological mystery into a global, crowdsourced race.

We look forward to your participation in this talk on the technical breakthroughs that led to the first continuous passages of text ever recovered from an unopened scroll.

Abstract

In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius buried the Roman town of Herculaneum, and with it, an entire library of papyrus scrolls, carbonized into fragile black lumps that crumble the moment anyone tries to unroll them. For nearly 2,000 years, that library was considered unreadable and lost.

The Vesuvius Challenge is out to prove otherwise. Launched as an open-science machine learning, computer vision, and geometry competition, it uses high-resolution X-ray CT scanning to virtually unwrap these scrolls, reading the text still trapped inside without ever physically opening them. With cash prizes offered to researchers and hobbyists worldwide who crack pieces of the puzzle, the project has turned an ancient archaeological mystery into a global, crowdsourced race.

In this talk, Giorgio Angelotti, Project Lead at the Vesuvius Challenge, will present the technical architecture and algorithmic breakthroughs that led to the recovery of the first continuous passages of text from an unopened scroll. He'll also address the current bottlenecks, ongoing model optimizations, and scalability challenges standing between where the project is now and reading the rest of the buried Herculaneum library.

Biography

Giorgio Angelotti is a theoretical physicist turned AI researcher who leads the Vesuvius Challenge, the global open-science project using machine learning to read the papyri Mount Vesuvius carbonized nearly 2,000 years ago. Under his direction, the Challenge achieved a world first in 2026: reading a sealed Herculaneum scroll end-to-end, revealing a previously unknown Stoic treatise on ethics, work covered by National Geographic, Forbes, The Washington Post, Reuters, CNN, and Scientific American, among others.

He studied physics at the University of Naples Federico II, Politecnico di Torino, and Sorbonne Université, before earning his PhD in Artificial Intelligence at ISAE-SUPAERO, where he also taught for three years. His research spans reinforcement learning and computer vision.

Event Info

Please help us plan ahead by registrating for the event at our meetup event-site .

What?	The Million Dollar Vesuvius Challenge: Breakthroughs and Perspectives
Who?	Giorgio Angelotti, Project Lead of the Vesuvius Challenge
When?	September 22nd 2026 @ 5pm - 6:30pm
Where?	Zoom
Registration	meetup event-site

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