Rustow Awarded Grant to Apply AI and Machine-learning to Geniza Documents.

May 12, 2022

Marina Rustow, Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East and Professor of Near Eastern Studies and History, has been granted funding by the University’s Schmidt DataX Fund for her “Handwritten Text Recognition for the Princeton Geniza Project (HTR4PGP).” The project seeks to triple the number of Geniza documents, currently about 5,000, that have been published by using machine learning to produce searchable transcriptions.

The Schmidt DataX Fund, supported through a major gift from the Schmidt Futures Foundation, provides grants to explore using artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate discovery. The core idea is to replace processes which are slow and laborious with machine-assisted methods,” said Peter Ramadge, director of the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML). “These projects are not confined to traditional ‘technical’ fields, but also span large-scale problems in the humanities and social sciences.”