Andrew Timothy Wilson

Archaeology and evolutionary anthropology are disciplines that have made important contributions to our understanding of the evolution of cities across time and space. In this paper we apply recent research in construction methods to explore a key aspect of the ecology of ancient cities, namely who built the houses and public monuments of the past and how the processes of construction were organised. Civic houses are often thought to have been built by householders; but we show that this is an unlikely explanation, using one well-documented city in north Greece, Olynthos. House construction gives us a unique insight into the ways that cities of the past were created. We present OIKoS (Olynthos Integrated Kostings System), a method that applies archaeological energetics analysis, offering a fully parametric and city-scale reconstruction of an ancient settlement using Rhinoceros 3D and Grasshopper. OIKoS enables rapid generation and evaluation of construction scenarios at city-scale. OIKoS has the potential to extend beyond classical archaeology, offering a scalable model relevant to heritage science, architectural history, and digital urban studies. Our research enables us to show that many more people were involved in the construction of the houses of a major civic centre than have been estimated as the total number of householders. House engineering offers a new way of understanding the emergence of ancient cities. Comparative evidence from a range of contemporary sites in the eastern and western Mediterranean provides further nuances for understanding the different activities that contributed to city building.

Using 2-dimensional (2D) images in order to teach about 3-dimensional (3D) molecules can limit the ability of students to grasp key visuospatial elements of 3D macromolecular structures, including depth perception and a sense of scale. The lack of simple, accessible, and easy-to-use teaching tools for visualizing and interacting with (i.e., rotating, translating, zooming) 3D virtual representations of macromolecular structure also continues to be a limitation for biochemistry instructors interested in incorporating more 3D visualizations in their classrooms. To address this current gap in available instructional tools, a novel app utilizing augmented reality (AR) technology to visualize macromolecular structures is described. The app allows users to easily visualize and manipulate the 3D structure of the potassium channel and is accompanied by a set of curricular materials to facilitate app implementation during a discussion on membrane transport. The app is free to download on both iOS and Android systems, is suitable for use on mobile and tablet systems, and is aimed for target audiences ranging from introductory to advanced undergraduate levels.

Archaeological heritage is part of a global identity; the need to preserve this heritage is important, not only to the local communities in which it is present but also to national and international communities. In recent years, digital recordings of monuments and buildings have provided significant contributions in the preservation, presentation and dissemination of cultural heritage. Digital recording of cultural heritage is a multidimensional and complex process: not only does it require researchers to address the problem of 3D digitisation of the monuments but also other aspects of handling this new digital content, such as management, representation and reproduction. Various techniques have been proposed and different technologies have been developed: some based on laser scanning, others on photogrammetric techniques, some using simple empirical methodologies and others based on imaging techniques. However, these techniques focus on cultural heritage assets which are still in existence. For lost, destroyed or damaged heritage, all that remains in a visual context are archived images. We investigate the use of photogrammetry on archived images, to attempt to create 3D reconstructions of lost heritage assets.

By collecting images of heritage assets from members of the public and processing them to create 3D-reconstructed models, the HeritageTogether project has accomplished the digital recording of nearly 80 sites across Wales, UK. A large amount of data has been collected and produced in the form of photographs, 3D models, maps, condition reports, and more. Here we discuss some of the different methods used to realize the potential of this data in different formats and for different purposes. The data are explored in both virtual and tangible settings, and—with the use of a touch table—a combination of both. We examine some alternative representations of this community-produced heritage data for educational, research, and public engagement applications.

This study aimed to organize a body of trajectories in order to identify, search for and classify both common and uncommon behaviors among objects such as aircraft and ships. Existing comparison functions such as the Fréchet distance are computationally expensive and yield counterintuitive results in some cases. We propose an approach using feature vectors whose components represent succinctly the salient information in trajectories. These features incorporate basic information such as the total distance traveled and the distance between start/stop points as well as geometric features related to the properties of the convex hull, trajectory curvature and general distance geometry. Additionally, these features can generally be mapped easily to behaviors of interest to humans who are searching large databases. Most of these geometric features are invariant under rigid transformation. We demonstrate the use of different subsets of these features to identify trajectories similar to an exemplar, cluster a database of several hundred thousand trajectories and identify outliers.