ISAW Researchers Present Interdisciplinary Work at Rutgers University AI x Antiquity Conference

On March 12 and 13, 2026, the Department of Classics at Rutgers University hosted a hybrid conference on the latest advances in AI and the Study of Antiquity. ISAW Associate Research Scholar Patrick J. Burns and PhD students Tanrui Zhu, Manolis Mavromatis, and Stefano Aprà were invited to present their works in this emerging interdisciplinary field.

Associate Research Scholar Patrick J. Burns presented a paper called "Is agentic philology an oxymoron? Some thoughts on error, control, and disciplinary definition,” covering recent work on using agentic AI to correct Latin text errors found in LLM training data repositories. This was a continuation of his Work-in-Progress Seminar talk at ISAW in January ("Latin as a self-correcting system: Or, can agentic AI 'do philology’?”) as well as recent talks at University of Cincinnati, Aarhus University, and this year’s annual meeting of the Society of Classical Studies. Patrick’s work on computational philology emerged throughout the event as well with several papers on the program referring to his academic coding work on projects like Latin BERT and LatinCy.

Tianrui Zhu presented ArchaeoHack 2025, the antiquity-focused undergraduate hackathon she co-organized with Manolis Mavromatis and Stefano Aprà in Fall 2025. Her talk, titled “Training models, training humans: building an Egyptian hieroglyph recognition app through a student hackathon”, reviewed the motivation, process, and impacts of ArchaeoHack 2025. She promoted the hackathon as an effective format for not only coming up with digital solutions to problems in ancient studies, but also for training a big cohort of students in both AI and Antiquity.

ISAW PhD student Allyson Blanck was also in attendance, contributing to discussions as a medical historian of the ancient Mediterranean.