Title: Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability

Speaker: Dr. Neil Smith

Dr. Smith’s research over the past fifteen years has been in computational cultural heritage and archaeology with a special emphasis in creating immersive collaborative digital environments. Prior to his current position as Co-director of the Center for Cyber-archaeology and Sustainability, he was a Research Scientist at the Visual Computing Center in KAUST. He played a critical role in developing novel software and hardware applications for archaeology and cultural heritage. Dr. Smith’s research interests focus on the merging of computational science with a variety of domain driven research topics including disciplines such as archaeology, cultural heritage, digital humanities, geophysics, marine science, and urban reconstruction. Current research has focused on novel computer vision solutions that incorporate geographic information systems, scientific visualization, informatics, and simulation. Dr. Smith has co-founded a KSA based company called FalconViz, which provides solutions from aerial scanning to digital twin immersive visualizations for the MENA region using drones. Currently, he is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and director of the USA branch of FalconViz. Since 2014, FalconViz has been involved in the scanning of all three UNESCO cultural heritage sites (Madain Saleh, Ad-diriya, and Al Balad Jeddah) and their visualization in VR. Most recent work has involved creating sustainable solution for cultural heritage using technologies developed in Cyber-archaeology.