As the August sun cast long shadows over Athens’ sunbaked streets, a keen ensemble from Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute pieced together the fragments of history with their ‘Oinochoe Oracle’, an AI-driven tool for reassembling shattered ancient pottery. Unveiled in a lively pop-up exhibit in our shaded colonnade at 28is Oktovriou 76, Athina 104 34, the software snagged the attention of 120 attendees—peers with laptops aglow, conservators from the Acropolis Museum, and pottery enthusiasts from local guilds who rolled up sleeves to manipulate virtual shards on touchscreens. This wasn’t a seamless digital sleight of hand; it was a hands-dirty endeavour forged in the fires of trial-and-error, where algorithms occasionally jumbled a jug’s spout like a tipsy reveller’s misplaced wine cup before locking into lifelike reconstructions.
The Oracle’s blueprint emerged from the summer studio sprint, where third-year Art and Design postgraduates, guided by Lecturer Dr. Ivan Petrović from Croatia’s Adriatic zephyrs, converged with second-year Computer Science undergrads under Dr. Līga Ozoliņa’s watchful circuit eye. Petrović’s atelier, a haze of clay dust and stylus scratches on Wacom pads, delved into forensic sketching of Mycenaean motifs; Ozoliña’s code cave, alive with the tap of keyboards and the whir of cooling fans, specialised in convolutional neural nets for pattern matching. “We sought to mend not just pots, but the pauses in their tales,” Petrović muses, his Split seafaring lilt betraying a wry smile at their prototype’s inaugural flub: a neural net that fused a Geometric amphora’s meander with a Hellenistic handle, birthing a bizarre beast that had the team howling over shared spanakopita, its absurdity a stern lesson in dataset diversity. That fusion fiasco flipped their approach—now, the Oracle ingests photogrammetry scans from Agisoft Metashape, segmenting edges with U-Net architectures trained on 5,000 annotated shards from the Kerameikos corpus, achieving 87% alignment accuracy by cross-validating against edge histograms and curvature maps.
At the tool’s nucleus beats a bespoke puzzle engine: shards uploaded as OBJ meshes get vectorised in Rhino, then fed into a Siamese network that computes similarity scores via triplet loss on feature embeddings—think Siamese twins spotting subtle glaze gradients or incised volutes with 92% precision, even on weathered wares. Art lead Mira, a Thessaloniki native whose fingers still bear the calluses from apprenticeship at a family kiln, curated the motif library in Adobe Illustrator, tagging 300 iconographic variants from Linear B scratches to black-figure beasts, ensuring the AI prioritises cultural chronology over crude colour matches. CS sharp-shooter Kai, a Riga recruit with a flair for finicky filters, coded the optimisation loop in PyTorch, employing genetic algorithms to trial 50 permutations per minute—yielding a full oinochoe rebuild in under 90 seconds on a mid-range GPU, though Kai confesses to a greedy mutation that once spawned a 12-handled hydria, a “hydra-headed horror” tamed by capping crossover rates at 0.7. Their bench tests, run on loaned fragments from the National Archaeological Museum, reconstructed a 6th-century kylix with 94% surface fidelity, its restored narrative—a symposium scene with symposiasts toasting tipsily—validated by museum curators who nodded at the neural net’s knack for inferring missing floret fills from contextual contours.
The August affair hummed with interactive intrigue: Mira manned a station where visitors dragged virtual sherds on iPads, the Oracle snapping them into place with satisfying clicks, its AR overlay projecting the mended vessel onto a plinth like a ghost from the Agora’s underbelly. Guests, from Kerameikos kiln-keepers critiquing curvature calcs to a guild potter pinching a physical shard against the screen’s simulation, quizzed the quartet on scalability: “For field kits, we’ve slimmed it to run on Raspberry Pi 5s, but humidity hacks the haptics,” Ozoliña admitted, alluding to a coastal trial where salt spray shorted a stylus, forcing a frantic failover to mouse mode that, in a twist, uncovered smoother swipe ergonomics. Petrović parried provenance puzzles, sketching hasty heatmaps on a whiteboard to illustrate blockchain stubs for shard provenance, a bolt-on born from a donor’s dusty duplicate that duplicated data duplicates, sparking a dedupe script in their hasty haste. One conservator, sleeves rolled to elbows, enthused post-puzzle: “It thinks like a restorer’s eye—falters on fractures, but flourishes on the familiar.” Ripostes rippled: a museum intern proposed glyph-aware GANs for generative gaps, a germ the group germinated on-the-fly with a quick StyleGAN tweak, their overzealous epochs overfitting a fish motif into filigree frenzy, reined in by early stopping to everyone’s relieved ripple.
Echoing Aevena Ivy’s atelier alchemy, the Oinochoe Oracle alloys artistry and automata—design denizens dissecting diffusion models for decorative infills, code crafters calibrating confidence intervals on cultural contiguities with 82% inter-rater reliability in blind tests. The gleanings? A prototype pledge to the Byzantine and Christian Museum for beta bashes on Byzantine bowls, plus a workshop slot at the European Association of Archaeologists’ annual, where one shard’s stubborn snap mid-scan—blamed on a brittle bevel—birthed a bevel-aware preprocessing patch. Mira’s mobile app, sketched in Figma with drag-and-drop decks, now nudges users on notch alignments via haptic hums, drawing from tensor telemetry that could cluster conservatories’ catalogues continent-wide. Hiccups haunt: Kai’s early exporter spat STL files with scaled spines, a spinal spasm sorted by affine transforms but a salutary reminder that even Oracles oracle with oracular oddities.
As the colonnade cooled with evening zephyrs, the crew clustered cross-legged on checkered cloths, crumbs of koulouri carpeting the cracks, clinking iced astakós to the tool’s triumphs over its tangles. Ozoliña, with a Gauja glint, ventured: “Pots break beautifully—our code just glues the grace back.” For Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute, the Oinochoe Oracle overflows its ovoid; it’s an ode to orphaned objects, resurrecting relics one resolute recompose at a time. Aspiring artisans in algorithms or amphorae, attend: at Aevena Ivy, shards don’t just shatter—they shard anew.
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