Oldest intact shipwreck

Archaeologists have found what they believe to be the world’s oldest intact shipwreck at the bottom of the Black Sea where it appears to have lain undisturbed for more than 2,400 years.

The 23-metre (75ft) vessel, thought to be ancient Greek, was discovered with its mast, rudders and rowing benches all present and correct just 2 km below the surface. A lack of oxygen at that depth preserved it, the researchers said.

“A ship surviving intact from the classical world, is something I would never have believed possible,” said Professor Jon Adams, the principal investigator with the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology  (MAP), the team that made the find. “This will change our understanding of shipbuilding and seafaring in the ancient world.”

The ship was probably a trading vessel of a type that researchers say was “on the side of ancient Greek pottery such as the ‘Siren Vase’ in the British Museum”. That work, which dates from about the same period, depicts a similar vessel bearing Odysseus past the sirens, with the Homeric hero tied to the mast to resist their songs.

The team plans to leave the vessel where it was found.  The University of Southampton  carbon dated a small piece and the results “confirmed it as the oldest intact shipwreck known to mankind”. The team said the data will be published at the Black Sea MAP conference at the Wellcome Collection in London later this week.

The international team of maritime archaeologists, scientists and marine surveyors is on a three-year mission to explore the depths of the Black Sea to gain a greater understanding of the impact of prehistoric sea-level changes.

They have found more than 60 shipwrecks which vary in age from a “17th-century Cossack raiding fleet, through Roman trading vessels, complete with amphorae, to a complete ship from the classical period”.

The MAP documentary team will show made a two-hour film at the British Museum next week.

The ‘Siren Vase’ in the British Museum: the shipwreck is believed to be a vessel similar to that shown bearing Odysseus.

Photograph: Werner Forman/UIG via Getty Images

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What Is Deep Learning AI?

by Bernard Marr

 While the technology is evolving—quickly—along with fears and excitement, terms such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning may leave you perplexed. 

I hope that the following 8 practical examples will help to clarify the actual use of deep learning technology today. 

    1.  Virtual assistants

Whether it’s Alexa or Siri or Cortana, the virtual assistants of online service providers use deep learning to help understand your speech and the language humans use when they interact with them.

    2.  Translations

In a similar way, deep learning algorithms can automatically translate between languages. This can be powerful for travellers, business people and those in government.

    3.  Vision for driverless delivery trucks, drones and autonomous cars

The way an autonomous vehicle understands the realities of the road and how to respond to them whether it’s a stop sign, a ball in the street or another vehicle is through deep learning algorithms. The more data the algorithms receive, the better they are able to act human-like in their information processing—knowing a stop sign covered with snow is still a stop sign.

    4.  Chatbots and service bots

Chatbots and service bots that provide customer service for a lot of companies are able to respond in an intelligent and helpful way to an increasing amount of auditory and text questions thanks to deep learning.

    5.  Image colorization

Transforming black-and-white images into colour was formerly a task done meticulously by human hand. Today, deep learning algorithms are able to use the context and objects in the images to colour them to basically recreate the black-and-white image in colour. The results are impressive and accurate.

    6.  Facial recognition

Deep learning is being used for facial recognition not only for security purposes but for tagging people on Facebook posts and we might be able to pay for items in a store just by using our faces in the near future. The challenges for deep-learning algorithms for facial recognition is knowing it’s the same person even when they have changed hairstyles, grown or shaved off a beard or if the image taken is poor due to bad lighting or an obstruction.

    7.  Medicine and pharmaceuticals

From disease and tumour diagnoses to personalised medicines created specifically for an individual’s genome, deep learning in the medical field has the attention of many of the largest pharmaceutical and medical companies.

    8.  Personalised shopping and entertainment

Ever wonder how Netflix comes up with suggestions for what you should watch next? Or where Amazon comes up with ideas for what you should buy next and those suggestions are exactly what you need but just never knew it before? Yep, it’s deep-learning algorithms at work.

The more experience deep-learning algorithms get, the better they become. It should be an extraordinary few years as the technology continues to mature.

From Bernard Marr & Co. and Forbes (edited)

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