Setting aside the relatively recent rise of electronic signatures, personalized stamps have been a popular form of identification for formal documents in East Asia. These identifiers – easily forged, but culturally ubiquitous – are the subject of research by Raja Adal, an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. But, it turns out, the human expertise required to study these stamps at scale was prohibitive – so Adal turned to supercomputer-powered AI to lend a hand. "[From] the perspective of the social sciences, what matters is not that these instruments are impossible to forge--they're not--but that they are part of a process by which documents are produced, certified, circulated and approved," Adal explained in an interview with Ken Chiacchia of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). "In order to understand the details of this process, it's very helpful to have a large database. But until now, it was pretty much impossible to easily index tens of thousands of stamps in an archive of documents, especially when these documents are all in a language like Japanese, which uses thousands of different Chinese characters."