The Topic:

More than 4000 years ago, people living in the Indus valley in what is now Pakistan and northwestern India wrote short sequences of symbols on seals, tablets, pottery, and other artifacts. These short texts constitute the Indus script, one of the last major undeciphered scripts of the ancient world. Deciphering the Indus script could have significant ramifications for the way we view the pre-history of the Indian subcontinent today. In this talk, Dr Rao first describes research aimed at analyzing the Indus script using computational and statistical techniques. This analysis provides insights into the syntax of the script and allows a comparison with other scripts encoding natural languages. Such an analysis however does not address the issue of interpreting the symbols (the semantics of the script). The second part of the talk focuses on how the constraints imposed by syntax and artifact use could suggest possible interpretations. He first discusses competing interpretations for the class of "fish" symbols in the script. And then explores the potentially provocative hypothesis that rather than simply indicating names and ownership of property as traditionally believed, Indus seals may have been an integral part of a pre-coinage system for economic transactions, allowing rapid generation of tokens, tablets and sealings to facilitate exchange of canonical amounts of goods, grains, animals, and labor.

The Speaker:

Rajesh P. N. Rao is the CJ and Elizabeth Hwang Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle. He is also the co-Director of the Center for Neurotechnology (CNT), Adjunct Professor in the Bioengineering department, and faculty member in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at UW. He directs the Neural Systems Laboratory located in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholar award, an NSF CAREER award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a Sloan Faculty Fellowship, and a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship.

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His research interests span computational neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces, and artificial intelligence as well as the Indus script and classical Indian paintings.