From March 16th to 23rd, 2025, the A3RD project team from the University of Chicago’s CAMEL Lab held a week-long workshop at the University’s John W. Boyer Center in Paris. Funded by a Faculty Grant from the University of Chicago’s International Institute of Research in Paris (IIRP), awarded to A3RD Principal Investigator Prof. Mehrnoush Soroush, the workshop brought together key international collaborators to advance the next phase of A3RD’s global qanat detection initiative.
Joining the CAMEL team were Rémi Cresson, senior Geospatial Engineer at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE), and Prof. Andrew Wilson and Dr. Bijan Rouhani from the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project at the University of Oxford.
As the beta-testing phase of the A3RD’s global qanat detection project, this workshop opened with a presentation of A3RD’s current progress, focusing on automated qanat detection in the Erbil Plain in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Project member Yuwei Zhou introduced the latest deep learning model, shared workflow insights, and presented inference results from the region
A3RD project member Yuwei Zhou introduces current research progress. Left to right: Prof. Andrew Wilson, Dr. Emad Khazraee, Yuwei Zhou, Dr. Parmanand Sinha, Çağlayan Bal, Jiayue Wang.
EAMENA’s decade-long commitment to manual annotation of satellite imagery has produced one of the most comprehensive datasets on endangered archaeological features, including qanats. In the second phase of the workshop, Çağlayan Bal and Dominik Lukas worked with Dr. Rouhani to curate a new training dataset of qanats from the Esfahan region in central Iran.
With guidance from Rémi Cresson, the team explored several strategies to improve model performance—such as transfer learning, diversifying and merging training datasets, and refining the model architecture to better handle regional variation in qanat morphology.
Reviewing model inference results in the Esfahan region. Left to right: Dominik Lukas, Prof. Andrew Wilson, Remi Cresson, Dr. Mehrnoush Soroush, Dr. Emad Khazraee, Dr. Parmanand Sinha.
In addition to technical improvements, a central focus of the workshop was making A3RD’s tools more accessible to scholars in the humanities. Led by Dr. Emad Khazraee, Dr. Parmanand Sinha, and Jiayue Wang, the team worked on exploring alternative tools and methods to simplify installation procedures, streamline workflows, and improve user documentation for non-technical researchers.
Left to right: Dr. Emad Khazraee, Dr. Parmanand Sinha, and Jiayue Wang.
This workshop builds on CAMEL Lab’s ongoing collaboration with INRAE and marks the beginning of an exciting new partnership with the EAMENA project at the University of Oxford.
Through this collaboration, A3RD is working to improve the current AI model by diversifying the training data with a variety of context-specific examples across different landscapes and cultural settings. In addition, the team is exploring multi-modal AI approaches that move beyond mere image recognition, incorporating descriptive information into the labeling and evaluation process. These innovations aim to make A3RD’s tools more flexible, robust, and scalable for detecting the many forms of qanat systems found throughout Eurasia.
We extend our heartfelt thanks to Prof. Robert Morrissey, Maria Melissa Guarte, Hugo Toudic, and the entire staff at the University of Chicago Center in Paris for their generous support, hospitality, and help in making this workshop a success. Their contributions provided an ideal environment for interdisciplinary exchange, innovation, and forward-thinking research.
A3RD workshop was joined by Prof. Robert Morrissey, Faculty Director of the International Institute of Research in Paris. Left to right: Dominik Lukas, Prof. Andrew Wilson, Yuwei Zhou, Prof. Mehrnoush Soroush, Prof. Robert Morrissey.