February 17, 2016
In November 2015, TED announced that AIA Trustee Sarah Parcak (University of Alabama at Birmingham) would receive the prestigious $1 million 2016 TED Prize for a project of her design. The New York Times now reports what Prof. Parcak plans to do with the grant: building “an online interactive citizen science platform to allow anyone with a computer to discover and monitor archaeological sites.”
By this summer, anyone interested in participating will be able to take a simple tutorial and receive pre-processed satellite images to monitor. Any crowdsourced finds, including signs of looting, will be shared with experts and local authorities for further investigation.
