School of Computer Science Seminar Mark-Jan Nederhof , "The 'insertion' control characters for Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text"

Speaker: Mark-Jan Nederhof

Title: The ‘insertion' control characters for Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text

Abstract: Egyptian hieroglyphic writing differs from most other writing systems and poses unique challenges for representation in machine-readable form. It took until 2009 for Unicode to adopt a basic list of hieroglyphs, and it took another 10 years for the first control characters to be adopted that are needed to format those hieroglyphs into running text. Two open-source implementations of those control characters in general-purpose programming languages rely on concepts from image processing and computational geometry. An open font was released that contains the hieroglyphs.

Bio: Mark-Jan Nederhof has been in the School since 2006. His main research area is computational linguistics, with emphasis on syntactic analysis and processing of ancient texts.