ArchaeoHack 2025 is HERE!
Applications are now CLOSED!
Are you ready to dig into the past using the tools of the future?
ArchaeoHack 2025 is a hackathon competition bringing together the ancient world and cutting-edge technology. Over one exciting weekend this November 15-16, teams will take on a real challenge in the field of ancient studies!
This year, teams will be asked to build a machine learning-powered recognition tool for an ancient writing system. The team that comes up with the best product will win $100 cash prize for each of its members!
Whether applying solo or with friends, participants will become part of a community of students passionate about history and technology. We welcome students from all backgrounds with different coding and linguistic competencies, as there will be workshops on vibe coding with the latest AI tools, machine learning algorithms for sign recognition, and the ancient script we are dealing with. Plus, every hackathon participant will get $20 allowance to purchase an AI tool of their choice!
Watch ArchaeoHack 2025 promotional video!
Program of the event
ArchaeoHack will start off with an in-person opening ceremony held at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW – NYU) on Monday, November 10. The organizers will introduce the technical challenge, the structure of the competition, logistics regarding reimbursements and venues, and the workshop schedule.
During the following week (Tuesday-Friday, November 11-14), the participants will attend three online workshops. The first online workshop will familiarize the participants with the best practices in using AI-powered coding tools, and will be led by Minwoo Choi, co-founder of Southbridge AI. The second workshop will introduce the Machine Learning algorithms relevant for sign recognition, and will be offered by Jing Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at NYU Anthropology and Tandon specializing in 3D modeling. The third workshop will be led by Ida Adsbøl Christensen, PhD Student at ISAW and philologist, who will reveal the target ancient language and outline the basic components of the writing system. By the end of the week, each participant will receive a $20 voucher to purchase any AI tools.
During the competition weekend, on November 15 and 16, the participants will come to NYU Bobst Library and work on the challenge in person. There will be 2-4 volunteers on site each day to offer guidance and technical support to the participants. At the end of the weekend, the participants will submit their products with full documentation and a user manual explaining how to use the digital tool. All material will be uploaded on the ArchaeoHack GitHub repository.
By November 19, a panel of judges will review the solutions presented by the participants and rate them based on classification accuracy, number of signs covered, and code and documentation quality. The participants are invited to a closing ceremony in-person at ISAW on Thursday, November 20. Here, the judges will announce the winners. Every member of the winning team will be awarded $100 in cash to be distributed via the Albert system.
Check list:
- November 10, 2025 (Monday): Opening ceremony at ISAW (in person)
- November 11-14, 2025 (Tuesday-Friday): 3 workshops (online)
- November 15-16, 2025 (Saturday-Sunday): Competition days at NYU Bobst Library (in person)
- November 20, 2025 (Thursday): Prizegiving and closing ceremony at ISAW (in person)
Click to see the flyer of the event!
Join the ArchaeoHack 2025 as a participant!
The application for the ArchaeoHack 2025 is open from September 19 to November 1 to all NYU undergraduates in New York. Students can apply either individually or as a 2-4 persons teams.
If you are interested in taking part in the competition, just click the button below:
By November 1, the organizer will choose the most promising five teams from the written applications. If possible, students who applied individually will be inserted into a 2-4 persons team.
Check list:
- Who can apply: All NYU undergraduate students in New York
- Team dimension: 2-4 people
- Application deadline: November 1, 2025
Join as a volunteer!
Are you a STEM graduate student, IT professional or scholar who is ready to get involved and give us a hand? If you are not an undergraduate and cannot take part directly in the competition, you can still help us!
We are looking for profiles with a strong interest and background in Computer Science and Digital Humanities who are ready to put their IT skills, knowledge and a bit of their time into play! Your task will be to assist your undergraduate colleagues as a volunteer during the competition weekend (15-16 November, 2025), offering guidance and technical support throughout the event. You will be asked to be present on site at NYU Bobst Library on one or both of the competition days (based on your availability), answer possible technical questions from the participants and help them navigate the task if needed.
If you are interested in joining the ArchaeoHack 2025, please feel free to contact us at the following e-mail address:
About us
– Organizers –
Tianrui Zhu (朱天瑞) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) of the New York University (NYU), and the mind behind the ArchaeoHack 2025.
Tianrui earned her bachelor’s degree in History from Yale-NUS College, with a minor in computational and statistical sciences. Later, she went on to complete the Regional Studies-East Asia Master of Arts program at Harvard University as a Harvard-Yenching scholar.
At ISAW she is interested in the connectivity of the Eurasian Steppes and the nomadic world. Her work straddles three disciplines: Archaeology, biomolecular sciences, and computational/statistical sciences. When not on excavation, you will find her analyzing ancient genomic data or integrating Machine Learning into Roman numismatics. As a field archaeologist, she has been working extensively in Uzbekistan (Buchara).
Stefano AprĂ is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) of the New York University (NYU), and a co-organizer of the ArchaeoHack 2025.
Stefano earned his bachelor’s degree in History from the University of Turin (Italy) and his Master of Arts in Near Eastern History and Archaeology from the Free University of Berlin (Germany).
At ISAW he is focusing on Bronze Age and Iron Age Anatolia and the Levant, and on digital humanities applied to the archaeological field. As a field archaeologist, he has worked in several excavation in Italy (Tindari, Solunto), Lebanon (Qornet ed-Deir), Jordan (Tell Ushayer), Türkiye (Kınık Höyük) and Saudi Arabia (Qurh-Al Mabiyat).
Manolis Mavromatis is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) of the New York University (NYU), and a co-organizer of the ArchaeoHack 2025.
Manolis earned his bachelor’s degree in History in the American College of Greece (Greece) and his Master of Science in Archaeology from the University of Oxford (UK).
At ISAW he is focusing on Bronza age and Iron Age urbanization in the Near East and the Mediterranean basin, Aegean archaeology, post-colonial archaeology and digital humanities. As a field archaeologist, he has worked for several seasons in Greece (Lyktos).
– Workshop speakers –
Minu Choi
Vibe Coding workshop
Minu Choi is the Co-founder at Southbridge, building a reliable agentic data layer to bridge model intelligence to massive, unstructured data. Think of it like the Southbridge chip in old computers, handling all the I/O so the processor could focus on thinking. She previously worked on AI at Meta, HubSpot, and building healthtech/regtech startups. Her research background includes using computer vision to analyze Roman coins or funny ion behaviors. She studied intellectual history and computational physics at Yale-NUS College – mornings reading Latin, afternoons training ML models. Now splitting time between SF and Singapore for Southbridge.
Dr. Jing Zhang
Machine Learning workshop
Jing Zhang is a Postdoctoral Scholar at NYU, jointly appointed in the Center for Robotics and Embodied Intelligence and the Department of Anthropology. She is advised by Chen Feng (AI4CE Lab) and Radu Iovita (Anthrotopography Lab). She received her Ph.D. in photogrammetry from Wuhan University. Over the next three years, she has two goals: (1) build agents that autonomously navigate NYC, use tools, and assist people safely; and (2) assemble and rectify fossil fragments to reveal patterns of human evolution. She advances these aims through Evolving Embodied Intelligence, a cognitively inspired framework that integrates perception, imagination, reasoning, action, and feedback in a closed loop across physical and digital worlds. Her interdisciplinary work has appeared in top venues in computer vision (CVPR, ICCV) and robotics (ICRA), and in leading journals spanning engineering and optics (IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, Photonics Research, Optics Express, Optics Letters). She was recently selected as one of the MIT EECS Rising Stars 2025.
Ida Adsbøl Christensen
Ancient Language workshop – Judge
Ida Adsbøl Christensen holds a BA and MA in Egyptology from the University of Copenhagen and is a current PhD Candidate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW – NYU). Ida specializes in ancient Egyptian philology, particularly the study of Demotic texts, and ancient Egyptian scientific traditions. Her doctoral research focuses on ancient Egyptian astral science and is centred around the edition of a corpus of unpublished astrological handbooks written in Demotic.
– Mentors and judges –
Prof. Trushant Majmudar
Mentor – Judge
Trush received his Ph.D. in Physics (granular physics) from Duke University. He did postdoctoral work at MIT in complex fluids and a second postdoc in the Applied Math Lab at Courant Institute at NYU on locomotion of microorganisms. He shifted to teaching track career in 2012. He enjoys enhancing student participation in research activities at the high school and undergraduate level, with a particular focus on traditionally underrepresented minorities in STEM fields. Over the years, he has worked extensively or dabbled into many areas of math and physics. His areas of expertise include Soft Matter Physics, Complex Fluids, Complex Systems, Nonlinear Dynamics, Inverse Problems, and Bio-Fluid Dynamics. Of late, he has been interested in Scientific ML, Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), Data Science, and AI. Specifically, he enjoys applying these methods to areas and problems where they haven’t already been the norm (biodiversity, ancient texts, Brain-Computer Interface, etc.)
Dion Ho
Mentor
Dion is an Applied Math Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University whose work spans structure-preserving numerical methods, high-performance GPU-compatible computing, and adversarial image perturbations. He develops fast, physically grounded solvers for atmospheric radiative transfer and is the author and maintainer of PythonicDISORT, an open-source radiative transfer solver. His machine learning research focuses on adversarial image perturbations — small, often imperceptible image changes that can change model predictions — and on using data-driven closure discovery and interpretable models to better connect machine learning with physical insight.
Felicia Tan
Mentor
Felicia Tan is a Ph.D. student in Human-Computer Interaction at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Her research examines how generative and agentic AI systems can better support human reasoning and decision-making, integrating experimental psychology with human-AI interaction to study how temporality and multi-agent reasoning shape knowledge work. She has published over a dozen papers in top-tier HCI venues such as CHI, DIS, and ACM Interactions, and serves as a reviewer.
Before academia, Felicia worked in early-stage venture capital and startups in Singapore. Her work bridges behavioral science and human-centered computing to design and develop technologies that help people think and learn more effectively.
Dr. Ashish Kumar
Mentor
Ashish Kumar completed his Ph.D. in Machine Learning from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He is the co-founder of Konigle, a VC-backed company headquartered in Singapore that serves small and medium-sized businesses around the world. His work focuses on applying cutting-edge technology to solve real business problems at scale.
Ashish is deeply passionate about deep learning and large language models, always exploring new ideas and pushing the boundaries of what is possible with AI. Hackathons hold a special place in his journey—during the early years of his Ph.D., he actively participated in several hackathons, which fueled his love for rapid experimentation and creative problem solving over a short span of time.
Ruslan Ibragimov
Mentor – Judge
Ruslan Ibragimov is an applied scientist at Amazon Ads, where he works on personalization and generative AI to make digital advertising more intelligent and creative. He’s passionate about building AI systems that connect research with real-world impact – from large language models and AI agents to next-generation ad relevance.
Dr. Patrick J. Burns
Judge
Patrick J. Burns is Associate Research Scholar, Digital Projects for the ISAW Library and Research Associate Professor at ISAW. In this role he is engaged in a variety of data-driven research and software development projects, and in particular in the areas of ancient world data processing and historical language text mining and analysis. Patrick is the maintainer of LatinCy, pretrained natural language processing pipelines for Latin and a co-author/developer (with David Bamman) for Latin BERT. At ISAW, Patrick has taught a number of courses that bring together ancient world study and computational methods, including “Introduction to Digital Humanities for the Ancient World”, “Text Analysis for Historical Language Research”, “Statistical Programming for Ancient World Study”, and “Generating Antiquity: Generating Antiquity: Artificial Intelligence for the Ancient World.”
Institutional supporters
ArchaeoHack 2025 is supported by the following institutions:
NYU ArchaeoHack 2025 