Australopithecus sediba

The Australopithecus sediba is another important reconstruction done for the open source exhibition "Facce. I molti volti della storia umana" [1]. In getting access to the cast and in producing the 3D model of the skull, to start the to work of the facial restitution, we have been supported by Prof. Telmo Pievani, who put us in connection with the exposition "Homo sapiens" (and with its scientific material). Once the digital model of the cranium has been produced with photographic (SfM/MVSR [2]) techniques, +Cícero Moraes could proceed with the protocol we developed about Forensic Facial Reconstruction [4] of Homini (Paleoart) with coherent anatomical deformation of a Pan troglodytes CT scan [3].

In order to go on with the free sharing and disclosure, under open licenses (Creative Commons Attribution International: CC-BY-4.0), of the material we produced during the preparation of the exhibition "Facce", I uploaded today the result of this FFR in Wikimedia Commons.

Here below is the final image, which has been developed thanks to a joned effort of Luca Bezzi (Arc-Team) and Nicola Carrara (Anthropological Museum of the University of Padua), for 3D model of the skull; +Cícero Moraes (Arc-Team) for the main work of 3D FFR modeling; Prof. Telmo Pievani (University of Padua, Biology Department), for scientific validation.

Facial Reconstruction of the Australopithecus sediba

The anatomical deformation technique, used for the facial reconstruction of the Australopithecus sediba, is well illustrated in the following video (by +Cícero Moraes):

Webography

[1] FaceBook, ATOR 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, TV7, oggiscienza, Archeomatica

[2] ATOR 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19

[3] ATOR 1, 2

[4] ATOR 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

ArcheOS at Linux Day 2015

"Saturday, October 24 returns the main Italian event dedicated to GNU/Linux, free software, open culture and sharing: dozens of events all over Italy, hundreds of volunteers and thousands of visitors will be involved  to celebrate digital freedom!"

This incipit comes from the official website of the event and summarizes what the Linux Day has been until now. As this year there will be also an event regarding ArcheOS (presented by +Leonardo Zampi  in the city of Florence, at the organization Libera Informatica), I took the occasion to write a post with some links regarding the archaeological GNU/Linux distro, so that this material will be available for anyone who would like to show also this particular branch of the FLOSS universe.

Let's start form the official website, which has been completely renovated by +Fabrizio Furnari and +Romain Janvier, accessible at this address: http://www.archeos.eu/

The main website

As you can read there, we have two mailing list: one for the users and the other for developers.

If you are familiar with it, you can also contact us on our IRC Channel at FreeNode (#archeos).

For those people who would like to work on the code, we use GitHub to develop the main system as well as all the related software projects (source packages, patches, small applications, GUI, etc...).

Finally (for the users), thanks to the collaboration of the University of Innsbruck (Near East and Ancient History Department), we have a wiki system in which we are slowly uploading tutorial and videotutorial. The website is available at this address: http://vai.uibk.ac.at/dadp/doku.php?id=start, but currently is under migration on a new server and will be not accessible for the next couple of weeks. I will keep this post update about the progress of this operation as soon as I will have news.

In the next days I hope to find the time collect more material regarding ArcheOS and to write a post about articles and presentations of the last years. Stay tuned!

Slide transition speed in impress.js

One of ATOR's purposes is to serve as some kind of reminder for all the tricks and actions we find out during our hacking sessions.

Today I'm preparing a presentation  with impress.js.

After my last lecture a listener told me that the transition speed between the single slides of my presentation was to fast.
I was moving across aerial photos, zooming in and out on points of interest.

After some groping in the dark I found the solution on github.

It's very easy:

Look for your impress.js file, open it with an editor and look for the tag "transitionDuration".
You will find it among the defauld config values, it's expressed in milliseconds. 6000 means 6 seconds of transition time.

Consider that this option defines an equal transition time for the whole presentation.
It's also possible to set different speed for every single slide transition.

Homo georgicus

One of the main attractions of the open source exhibition "Facce. I molti volti della storia umana"[1] is the facial reconstruction of four of the five individuals found in the Dmanisi (Georgia) excavation [2] and currently known as Homo georgicus. This project was possible thanks to the kindness of Prof. David Lordkipanidze (of the Georgian National Museum) and to the precious help of our friend Dr. Zviad Sherazadishvili.

The particular feature that characterized the facial reconstructions of the specimens of H. gerogicus is that each skull has some peculiarities that make it unique compared to the other subjects of the same species so far recognized. Moreover these differences are due both to sex, both to age and both to individual physiognomy. Indeed the five skulls of Dmanisi represent a wide range of variables, with at least a female specimen, two males with different individual characteristics (one with a pronounced undershot), an old subject and a young one (unfortunately impossible to reconstruct due to the missing facial part of the cranium).

The forensic reconstruction, performed with the anatomical deformation methodology [3], amplifies these differences, giving a face to our ancestors and simplifying at the same time the perception of the peculiarities which characterize the four specimens, at least for those people who are not familiar with anthropology and osteometry (like most of the visitors of the exposition). 

According to the main purpose of the open source exhibition (sharing as open data all the material we produced), today I am uploading the result of these reconstructions on Wikimedia Commons with a CC-BY license. Here below you can see the four images developed, like always, with a team work. This time the equipe was composed by Nicola Carrara (Anthropological Museum of the University of Padua) and Luca Bezzi (Arc-Team), for the 3D scan with SfM and MVSR techniques [4]; Cícero Moraes (Arc-Team), for the facial reconstruction with Blender; Telmo Pievani for the final validation (University of Padua, Biology Department).

The first  male subject

The old subject

The female subject

The second male subject (with pronounced undershot)

Webography

[1] FaceBook, ATOR 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
[2] ATOR 1

[3] ATOR 1, 2
[4] ATOR 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19

ArcheoFOSS VI, proceedings of the workshop now available as Open Access

This is just another fast post to notify that we are going on in spreading all the proceedings of the workshop ArcheoFOSS as Open Access. This time, thanks to the effort of Francesca Cantone (University of Federico II - Napoli), we released the publication of the sixth meeting, which took place in Napoli in 2011. The doc is in PDF and it is available under a Creative Commons license at this link.

Here below is the front cover of the printed version, which can be ordered at this page.

© 2015 - Scienze e Lettere dal 1919 S.r.l.

ArcheoFOSS I, proceedings of the workshop now available as Open Access

Hi all,

this fast post is to notify that are finally available as Open Access the proceedings of the first workshop "Open Source, Free Software e Open Format nei processi di ricerca archeologici" (en: "Open Source, Free Software and Open Format in archaeological reasearch precesses"), which in the later editions will be known as ArcheoFOSS. The event took place in Grosseto in May 2006.

Since Open Access in archeology has always been one of the main topics of this workshop, some days ago we started a discussion on the official mailing list to try to free some of the proceedings which are actually available just as printed publications. The first result has been the release of the articles collected in the first edition, thanks to the kindness of Giancarlo Macchi Janica. Currently we are working on the other two workshops which are not yet available: ArcheoFOSS V (held in Foggia in 2010) and ArcheoFOSS VI (held in Neaples in 2011). 

The image below shows the front cover of the digital publication of the proceedings of the first edition, while here you can read the official announcement about the Open Access publication (pdf here).

Front cover of proceedings of the first workshop "Open Source, Free Software e Open Format nei processi di ricerca archeologici"

A special thanks also to +Stefano Costa for uploading everything on ArcheoFOSS website.

PS

In the proceedings you can also find some articles written by Arc-Team members, regarding:
1. One of the first release of ArcheOS (v.1.6): here in Academia and here in ResearchGate (by +Alessandro Bezzi, +Luca Bezzi, +Denis Francisci, +Rupert Gietl)
2.  The use of +GRASS GIS in archaeology: Academia / ResearchGate (by Michael Burton, +Alessandro Bezzi, +Luca Bezzi, +Denis Francisci, +Rupert Gietl, +Markus Neteler)
3. The use of FLOSS in a case of study in archaeology: Academia / ResearchGate (by +Luca Bezzi, Stefano Boaro, Giovanni Leonardi, +damiano lotto)

Homo floresiensis

"Homo floresiensis ("Flores Man"; nicknamed "hobbit" and "Flo") is widely believed to be an extinct species in the genus Homo. The remains of an individual that would have stood about 3.5 feet (1.1 m) in height were discovered in 2003 on the island of Flores in Indonesia. Partial skeletons of nine individuals have been recovered, including one complete skull, referred to as LB1"

This is the incipit of the Wikipedia page dedicate to the Homo floresiensis. I started the post with this sentence because today I will share the result of our research about Archaeological Foresic Facial Reconstruction (AFFR) of the individual LB1 of this species, performed for the open source exhibition "Facce. I molti volti della storia umana". If you are a regular reader of tis blog, you will know that we attempted already a facial reconstruction of the "hobbit", as he was one oh the Hominini we worked on for the Brazilian exposition "Faces de Evolução" (curated by Prof. Dr. Moacir Elias Santos of the Archaeological Museum of Ponta Grossa and Prof. Esp. Vivian Tedardi of Rosicrucian and Egyptian Museum in Brazil). Like it happened for the Taung Child (Australopithecus africanus), also in this case we developed a new model (v 2.0), after a first reconstruction, simply based on a an anatomical study and on basic paleo-artistic techniques.
Here below you can see the image of the first reconstructive model (H. floresiensis v. 1.0), while here you can read the old ATOR post about this first attempt.

Homo floresiensis version 1.0

After the first model, we changed completely our approach to paleo-art, as we developed the new technique based on the anatomical deformation of Pan troglodytes or Homo sapiens ct x-ray scan (depending of the kind of hominid to be reconstructed). The result of this new approach is the H. floresiensis new model (v. 2.0) we release today and that you can see in the image below.

Homo floresiensis version 2.0

Also in this case, the model is the result of a team work. Here below are the credits:

1. 3D scan of the cast: Moacir Elias Santos (Archaeological Museum of Ponta Grossa)

2. 3D modeling (skull restoration, anatomical study, CT deformation): +Cícero Moraes (Arc-Team) with the precious contribute of Prof. Peter Brown (New England University in Armidale, Australia)

3. scientific validation: Prof. Telmo Pievani (University of Padua, Department of Biology), Dott. Nicola Carrara(Anthropological Museum of the University of Padua), Prof. Peter Brown (New England University in Armidale, Australia)

The image of the new model of Homo floresiensis has just been added on Wikimedia Commons and it is avalible for any use under the CC-BY license (which we use normally for the material we share through ATOR).

Have a nice day!