The ancient civilization of the Indus River Valley used hundreds of symbols and signs for communicating. But archeologists disagree on whether those are merely pictograms, like our dollar sign, or are graphemes, letters or groups of letters that represent speech sounds.

Florida Tech computer scientist Debasis Mitra is developing a machine learning algorithm to help in the decoding efforts. “I work on medical imaging and some of the challenges are similar,” says Mitra. Using two-staged artificial neural networks, the automated script recognition system has achieved 88% success in detecting graphemes. The team hopes to eventually develop a system that allows archaeologists to take a smartphone photo of a text and route it directly into the database.

• Debasis Mitra