Brent Seales Motivated by Possibilities of Seemingly Impossible Problems

Video | Jul 20, 2016

At the age of 11, Brent Seales conducted his first research project. He wanted a hang glider and without the money to buy one, he wanted to build it. He wrote to a distributor and learned a lot about flying. It was a failed project — but it was that curiosity that led Seales, now a University of Kentucky researcher, to accomplish things no one else has ever done before.

Eventually, as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Seales' curiosity became fixed on computing and the possibilities it offered.

"For me, it was a completely blank slate, in a world where a lot of things were already settled," he said. "So, I think it was the unknown potential for how I could contribute. That was really what spurred me as a graduate student to go forward with research."

Seales, chair of the UK Department of Computer Science in the College of Engineering, would end up contributing significantly, answering questions that many hadn't thought to ask yet. His research has been funded by Google, the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and the U.S. Army. He has received more than $10 million in funding during the past 10 years and is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications.

Today, he is known internationally for his innovations in digital imaging of antiquities. Seales has dedicated most of his career to uncovering treasures buried in old manuscripts and damaged materials.

"In the mid '90s there was a huge push, because of the internet's emergence, for us to make libraries digital," he said.

But as he began imaging books and art for the world to access digitally, Seales realized there was a more challenging problem to solve: imaging materials from centuries past that were too charred to decipher, such as ancient scrolls.

"I wanted to move quickly towards things that were much more fragile, mysterious, unknown, located in the nooks and crannies of museums and libraries," he said.

He had a vision to take the most badly damaged things — Herculaneum scrolls, items in the Dead Sea Scrolls Collection, things in Saint Catherine's Monastery — and completely unwrap them using only the imaging, never physically disturbing the artifacts. Not only would he digitally preserve the material, but he would bring back to life writings not seen for millennia. So working with students, Seales created a revolutionary virtual unwrapping tool that can help uncover text from ancient scrolls non-invasively.

His most recent breakthrough was an ancient scroll discovered inside the Holy Ark of the synagogue at Ein Gedi in Israel. He and his research team revealed within the scroll the oldest known copy of the book of Leviticus (other than the Dead Sea Scrolls), carbon dated to the 3rd century C.E. The revelation garnered worldwide attention.

"The moment that I received an email from Israel, telling me that we had discovered a text in a scroll that was 1,500 years old…that's a moment that I don't think I'll be able to replicate in my career," he said.

Seales credits his team at UK and former colleagues at the Google Cultural Institute, where he was a visiting scientist in 2012, for making discoveries like the Leviticus text possible.

"The year at Google was fantastic because of the inspiration that comes from being around people who are swinging for the fence…trying to work on a problem that everyone else thinks might be impossible," he said. "I really needed that at that point in my career, because we had come up against some really tough obstacles, and I wanted to just start thinking about those problems in a different way."

He brought that inspiration back to UK and looked to students to help him forge a path to discovery.

"Because, honestly, we can't really get much done in a university setting without having really talented students willing to work with us on our work," Seales said.

Many of his students have gone on to work at NASA, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants after graduating from UK.

"Every time I have a student graduate, we take that photo and I see the joy," he said. "That's a moment that I love."

At the December 2015 Commencement, Seales stood by former student and Google software engineer Matt Cutts as Cutts received an honorary doctorate of engineering. Cutts has become well known as one of Google’s first 100 employees and headed the company’s Webspam group until taking leave recently to work with the U.S. Digital Service.

"That was the first time that I'd had a former student receive an honorary Ph.D.," he said. "It was a tremendous, tremendous moment for me in my career."

The success of Cutts, and other students, is no surprise to Seales though. He thinks UK is one of the most productive places a computer scientist could be. UK is one of eight universities in the U.S. that has colleges of agriculture, engineering, medicine and pharmacy on a single campus, and computer science has a role to play in each of those.

"With such a large number of opportunities at the University of Kentucky, there's space for a student to really discover who they are, what their talents are, and then to find the direction that they really need to be going while they’re here," he said. "I think, having that space, is a key part of being at the University of Kentucky."