Now that I’m on site at CERN, I receive email notifications of events going on throughout the lab. Many of them are way over my head: Half a Century of Supergravity — the quest to bridge Einstein and the Quantum I don’t think so…
But CERN-IT hosted a talk yesterday that seemed intriguing: AI for Heritage Preservation in Petra
I knew a little bit about Petra, but the introduction to this talk was a fascinating. Talking about the Nabataeans and how they created this impregnable city to control the caravan trade in frankincense, myrrh, and spices moving between Arabia and the Mediterranean world. How they created an exacting system for collecting, transferring and distributing precious water to keep the city of some 20,000 residents alive.
Now the city is a UNESCO World Heritage site with over a million visitors per year. Local Bedouin people had continued to live there, but the Jordanian authorities built a new town nearby to relocate residents from the site. There are a number of stressors on the site and administrators are working with researchers to see if a technical solution can help manage these issues.
Of course the topic quickly turns to AI. The researchers are building what is called a “Digital Twin” of Petra. Basically a complicated computer simulation of the site from a physical, climitalogical, and sociological point of view. They are hoping to use AI to explain current conditions and the implications of proposed changes. There was concern in the room about telling people you need to move to this new building “because AI told us so”, but the speaker was adamant the AI would only inform human decision making… we’ll see how to that turns out.
More to our story, the interesting part is how national labs often contribute to initiatives that go far beyond their specific domain. CERN has a wealth of Data Scientists and computational physicists who are helping to develop this tool.
Getting Lost at CERN
This seminar was at the CERN Computing building (building 31) - I set out extra early from the known world to get to this building. There is a map page for CERN as well as a phone app. The app can provide directions, but because CERN currently has a lot of construction and the way many buildings are physically linked together it’s not that straight forward to just walk from one end of the site to another. In the end I walked to the Southern border of the site which has a tall fence and vineyards just on the other side and followed that to the spot I need to walk in toward the building.
Once inside, there is a numbering scheme of every room in the buildings. 31/3-004 means room
4 on the (European base 0) 3rd floor in building 31. For ground level and below there is
a special alphabetic scheme that I don’t yet understand, like 31/S-023.
Since I had a better idea of where I was heading after the meeting for lunch I took a more roundabout route and eventually found my way. Along this path there are so many fascinating buildings where superconducting magnets are constructed and various smaller colliders operate.
The most interesting building I spotted was this:
…and yes, it’s a real thing.