title: EduceLab
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EduceLab 🏛️🔬
EduceLab is a highly specialized heritage science laboratory at the University of Kentucky, expertly designed to provide data-intensive yet object-centric solutions to the most challenging problems in the study of cultural heritage.
Built on an NSF mid-scale infrastructure grant, our mission is to advance the interdisciplinary domain of heritage science by developing advanced methodologies for the non-invasive imaging, characterization, and digital analysis of cultural and natural heritage.
🌟 Our Focus Areas
We combine STEM with the humanities to enhance the understanding, care, and sustainable use of cultural heritage. Our research and engineering efforts focus heavily on:
- Advanced Multimodal Imaging: Utilizing micro-CT, photogrammetry, computational photography, and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) to digitize and analyze objects in unparalleled fidelity.
- Materials Characterization: Deploying precise analytical tools to understand the physical, chemical, and structural properties of delicate heritage materials.
- Large-Scale Data Processing: Building cyberinfrastructure and methodologies for capturing, structuring, processing, and mining massive volumetric and imaging datasets (e.g., terabyte-sized CT volumes).
🔬 The EduceLab Infrastructure
Our unique ecosystem of non-destructive instrumentation comprises four operational clusters designed to address the challenging variability of heritage science contexts:
- 🧪 BENCH: Gold-standard, high-capacity laboratory equipment in a fixed, controlled environment for precise measurement and materials characterization, including tools like SEMs.
- 🚙 MOBILE: Mobile equipment that can be deployed in-situ for collections, sites, and landscapes that cannot travel.
- 🛠️ FLEX: A protean, configurable prototype environment for envisioning, building, and testing custom instrument configurations (e.g., specialized optical rigs and camera arrays).
- 💻 CYBER: The cyberinfrastructure powering efficient data flow—from acquisition to structured analysis—supporting high-performance computing, data science, and artificial intelligence.
💻 Open Source & Software
We are committed to open science and building accessible, high-performance tools for the broader heritage science community. Our repositories largely focus on:
- High-Performance Rendering: Developing real-time volume rendering solutions (leveraging formats like Zarr) for interacting with massive, complex heritage datasets.
- Imaging & Capture Utilities: Creating accessible applications and scripts for automating hardware, calculating optical system parameters, and managing DSLR camera arrays.
- Volumetric Analysis Tools: Open-source libraries and toolkits designed for the complex processing, segmentation, and mapping of 3D datasets.
🤝 Connect & Collaborate
Heritage science is inherently a convergence discipline. We rely on robust collaborations across computer science, engineering, physics, chemistry, and the humanities.
- 🌐 Website: educelab.engr.uky.edu
- 🐙 GitHub: @educelab
- 📍 Location: University of Kentucky | Lexington, KY
EduceLab is supported by a National Science Foundation Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure Project (Award Number 2131940).