Browsing by Author "Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira"

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    Algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judah's military correspondence sheds light on composition of biblical texts.
    (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016-04) Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira; Shaus, Arie; Sober, Barak; Levin, David; Na'aman, Nadav; Sass, Benjamin; Turkel, Eli; Piasetzky, Eli; Finkelstein, Israel
    The relationship between the expansion of literacy in Judah and composition of biblical texts has attracted scholarly attention for over a century. Information on this issue can be deduced from Hebrew inscriptions from the final phase of the first Temple period. We report our investigation of 16 inscriptions from the Judahite desert fortress of Arad, dated ca 600 BCE-the eve of Nebuchadnezzar's destruction of Jerusalem. The inquiry is based on new methods for image processing and document analysis, as well as machine learning algorithms. These techniques enable identification of the minimal number of authors in a given group of inscriptions. Our algorithmic analysis, complemented by the textual information, reveals a minimum of six authors within the examined inscriptions. The results indicate that in this remote fort literacy had spread throughout the military hierarchy, down to the quartermaster and probably even below that rank. This implies that an educational infrastructure that could support the composition of literary texts in Judah already existed before the destruction of the first Temple. A similar level of literacy in this area is attested again only 400 y later, ca 200 BCE.
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    Algorithmic handwriting analysis of the Samaria inscriptions illuminates bureaucratic apparatus in biblical Israel.
    (PloS one, 2020-01) Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira; Shaus, Arie; Sober, Barak; Turkel, Eli; Piasetzky, Eli; Finkelstein, Israel
    Past excavations in Samaria, capital of biblical Israel, yielded a corpus of Hebrew ink on clay inscriptions (ostraca) that documents wine and oil shipments to the palace from surrounding localities. Many questions regarding these early 8th century BCE texts, in particular the location of their composition, have been debated. Authorship in countryside villages or estates would attest to widespread literacy in a relatively early phase of ancient Israel's history. Here we report an algorithmic investigation of 31 of the inscriptions. Our study establishes that they were most likely written by two scribes who recorded the shipments in Samaria. We achieved our results through a method comprised of image processing and newly developed statistical learning techniques. These outcomes contrast with our previous results, which indicated widespread literacy in the kingdom of Judah a century and half to two centuries later, ca. 600 BCE.
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    Approximation of functions on manifolds in high dimension from noisy scattered data
    (Jaen Journal on Approximation) Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira; Levin, David
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    Forensic document examination and algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judahite biblical period inscriptions reveal significant literacy level.
    (PloS one, 2020-01) Shaus, Arie; Gerber, Yana; Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira; Sober, Barak; Piasetzky, Eli; Finkelstein, Israel
    Arad is a well preserved desert fort on the southern frontier of the biblical kingdom of Judah. Excavation of the site yielded over 100 Hebrew ostraca (ink inscriptions on potsherds) dated to ca. 600 BCE, the eve of Nebuchadnezzar's destruction of Jerusalem. Due to the site's isolation, small size and texts that were written in a short time span, the Arad corpus holds important keys to understanding dissemination of literacy in Judah. Here we present the handwriting analysis of 18 Arad inscriptions, including more than 150 pair-wise assessments of writer's identity. The examination was performed by two new algorithmic handwriting analysis methods and independently by a professional forensic document examiner. To the best of our knowledge, no such large-scale pair-wise assessments of ancient documents by a forensic expert has previously been published. Comparison of forensic examination with algorithmic analysis is also unique. Our study demonstrates substantial agreement between the results of these independent methods of investigation. Remarkably, the forensic examination reveals a high probability of at least 12 writers within the analyzed corpus. This is a major increment over the previously published algorithmic estimations, which revealed 4-7 writers for the same assemblage. The high literacy rate detected within the small Arad stronghold, estimated (using broadly-accepted paleo-demographic coefficients) to have accommodated 20-30 soldiers, demonstrates widespread literacy in the late 7th century BCE Judahite military and administration apparatuses, with the ability to compose biblical texts during this period a possible by-product.
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    Image quality assessment: Learning to rank image distortion level
    (Electronic Imaging) Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira; Shimshi, Or
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    Multispectral imaging reveals biblical-period inscription unnoticed for half a century.
    (PloS one, 2017-01) Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira; Mendel-Geberovich, Anat; Shaus, Arie; Sober, Barak; Cordonsky, Michael; Levin, David; Moinester, Murray; Sass, Benjamin; Turkel, Eli; Piasetzky, Eli; Finkelstein, Israel
    Most surviving biblical period Hebrew inscriptions are ostraca-ink-on-clay texts. They are poorly preserved and once unearthed, fade rapidly. Therefore, proper and timely documentation of ostraca is essential. Here we show a striking example of a hitherto invisible text on the back side of an ostracon revealed via multispectral imaging. This ostracon, found at the desert fortress of Arad and dated to ca. 600 BCE (the eve of Judah's destruction by Nebuchadnezzar), has been on display for half a century. Its front side has been thoroughly studied, while its back side was considered blank. Our research revealed three lines of text on the supposedly blank side and four "new" lines on the front side. Our results demonstrate the need for multispectral image acquisition for both sides of all ancient ink ostraca. Moreover, in certain cases we recommend employing multispectral techniques for screening newly unearthed ceramic potsherds prior to disposal.
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    Neural Network Approximation of Refinable Functions.
    (CoRR, 2021) Daubechies, Ingrid; DeVore, Ronald; Dym, Nadav; Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira; Kovalsky, Shahar Z; Lin, Kung-Ching; Park, Josiah; Petrova, Guergana; Sober, Barak
    In the desire to quantify the success of neural networks in deep learning and other applications, there is a great interest in understanding which functions are efficiently approximated by the outputs of neural networks. By now, there exists a variety of results which show that a wide range of functions can be approximated with sometimes surprising accuracy by these outputs. For example, it is known that the set of functions that can be approximated with exponential accuracy (in terms of the number of parameters used) includes, on one hand, very smooth functions such as polynomials and analytic functions (see e.g. \cite{E,S,Y}) and, on the other hand, very rough functions such as the Weierstrass function (see e.g. \cite{EPGB,DDFHP}), which is nowhere differentiable. In this paper, we add to the latter class of rough functions by showing that it also includes refinable functions. Namely, we show that refinable functions are approximated by the outputs of deep ReLU networks with a fixed width and increasing depth with accuracy exponential in terms of their number of parameters. Our results apply to functions used in the standard construction of wavelets as well as to functions constructed via subdivision algorithms in Computer Aided Geometric Design.
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    Writer Characterization and Identification of Short Modern and Historical Documents
    (Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2019, 2019-09-23) Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira; Levin, David; Piasetzky, Eli; Finkelstein, Israel