Gaps in our knowledge of ancient Rome could be filled by AI

It's not the first time AI has been used to join up the missing dots in Roman history. Dr Sommerschield developed Aeneas along with her co-research leader Dr Yannis Assael, an AI specialist at Google DeepMind. It automates the process of contextualising based on parallels, in the blink of an eye. Aeneas draws on a vast database of of 176,000 Roman inscriptions including images and uses a carefully designed AI system to pull up a range of relevant historical parallels, to support the work of historians, according to Dr Assael. "What the historian can't do is assess these parallels in a matter of seconds across tens of thousands of inscriptions, and that is where AI can come in as an assistant."