People

Emily L. Spratt is a Ph.D. candidate in Byzantine and Renaissance–Baroque art history at Princeton with specializations in Venice and the Mediterranean, 1400–1600, and the Hellenic world from antiquity to the Greek independence movement. Her current side project explores the philosophical intersections of art and science from the Enlightenment to the contemporary period, and the implications of developments in computer vision research on aesthetic judgment. Having completed an M.A. in Byzantine art history at UCLA and a B.A. in religious studies and the history of art at Cornell University, Emily is able to combine the perspectives gained in the Renaissance and Byzantine fields of study in her larger project on the nachleben of the Byzantine Empire. Her dissertation, “Byzantium Not Forgotten: Constructing the Artistic and Cultural Legacy of an Empire between East and West in the Early Modern Period,” is a tripartite study of the response of religious art and architecture to different modes of rulership in the Venetian, Ottoman, and Slavic domains after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. With experience at the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens, the Benaki Museum, and the former Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Emily has been a collaborator on a number of projects and international exhibitions in Greece. Also a passionate teacher, Emily looks forward to the opportunity to teach her recently designed seminar, “Is it Beautiful? Art, Artifice, and Artificial Intelligence: Aesthetics from the Enlightenment to the Digital Age,” which stems out of her research on this digital humanities project!

Dr. Ahmed Elgammal is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Dr. Elgammal is the director of the Digital Humanities Laboratory at Rutgers and also a member of the Center for Computational Biomedicine Imaging and Modeling (CBIM) at Rutgers. His primary research interest is computer vision and machine learning. His research focus includes human activity recognition, human motion analysis, tracking, human identification, and statistical methods for computer vision. He develops robust real-time algorithms to solve computer vision problems in areas such as visual surveillance, visual human-computer interaction, virtual reality, and multimedia applications. Dr. Elgammal’s interests also include research on document image analysis. He received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2006. Dr. Elgammal received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in computer science and automatic control from University of Alexandria, Egypt, in 1993 and 1996, respectively. He received another M.Sc. and his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2000 and 2002, respectively.