LEGION

The hybrid conference “Heritage Meets Science 2” takes place on 23 October 2026 (from 9:00 AM) at the “TU the Sky” venue (TU Wien, Campus Getreidemarkt 9, 1060 Vienna) and online. Held approximately annually since 2019 as the Heritage Science Austria Meeting, this year’s conference is held for the first time under the umbrella of E-RIHS.at following Austria’s accession to E-RIHS ERIC in June 2026, and is co-organised by Klaudia Hradil (TU Wien) and Maria Bianca D’Anna (OeAI / OeAW, University of Innsbruck). As highlighted in the official announcement on Heritage Science Austria, newly funded projects of the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ (OeAW) Heritage Science Austria (HSA 2.0) programme will present their research throughout the day.

The LEGION project team—Dominik Hagmann (OeAI / OeAW), Irene Ballester-Campos (TU Wien), Silvia Radbauer (OeAI / OeAW), Sebastian Zambanini (TU Wien), and Martin Kampel (TU Wien)—will present our research talk “AI-assisted heritage science for archaeological legacy data: The LEGION project” in the afternoon session (15:10–17:10). Registration for both on-site and online participation is open until 22 October 2026 via email to M. Bianca D’Anna (Maria.DAnna@oeaw.ac.at).

The LEGION project will be strongly represented at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2026) in Malmö, Sweden. Our team contributes with multiple joint papers and presentations across specialized tracks—including WiCV and VISART VIII—introducing our automated classification workflows and the new CENTURIA archaeological pottery benchmark dataset.

We are delighted that Master's student Gissu Valentina Naghavi (corresponding author, supervised by Martin Kampel and Irene Ballester) is presenting our joint paper, "OCR-Based Field Extraction for Archaeological Pottery Metadata: The CENTURIA Dataset" (co-authored with Dominik Hagmann, Martin Kampel, and Irene Ballester), at the renowned Women in Computer Vision workshop (WiCV @ ECCV 2026) in Malmö, Sweden. Valentina will showcase our automated metadata extraction pipelines, celebrating impactful contributions of female researchers in computer vision.

At the 8th Workshop on Vision for Art and Culture (VISART VIII @ ECCV 2026) in Malmö, Sweden (8 September 2026, 13:45–18:00), Gissu Valentina Naghavi (corresponding author, supervised by Martin Kampel and Irene Ballester) will present our joint research, "OCR-Based Field Extraction for Archaeological Pottery Metadata: The CENTURIA Dataset" (co-authored with Dominik Hagmann, Martin Kampel, and Irene Ballester). The contribution introduces an end-to-end OCR and metadata extraction workflow for Roman pottery drawings in the "Age of Image-Machines".

The national Heritage Science Austria research portal featured the LEGION project in a dedicated science report celebrating the milestone release of the open-access CENTURIA benchmark dataset and accompanying research paper (arXiv:2608.30616). The article highlights the fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration between the Austrian Archaeological Institute (OeAI / OeAW) and TU Wien's Computer Vision Lab (CVL), our upcoming presentations at ECCV 2026 (WiCV and VISART VIII), and our overarching mission to automate Roman pottery classification using Artificial Intelligence.

The science communication platform Gist.Science published an accessible plain-language explanation and technical breakdown of our preprint, "OCR-Based Field Extraction for Archaeological Pottery Metadata: The CENTURIA Dataset". The feature breaks down how the LEGION team bridges the domain gap in historical document analysis by combining handwritten text recognition (HTR) and key information extraction (KIE) with efficient LoRA fine-tuning—turning tens of thousands of analogue Roman pottery drawings from Carnuntum into structured, searchable open data.

A huge thank you to our dedicated student volunteers, Antonia Schmid and Rebekka Lederhofer, who provided outstanding support to the LEGION project throughout August 2026! Embracing our Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) and Explainable AI (XAI) workflows, they worked with open-source tools such as PyPotteryScan to annotate, segment, and curate archaeological metadata for hundreds of Roman pottery drawings from Carnuntum. In addition to their digital work, an excursion to the Roman City of Carnuntum and hands-on insights into the Archaeological Central Depot of Lower Austria (Landessammlungen NÖ) in Hainburg provided valuable direct context to the ceramic material. Their efforts play a crucial role in enhancing our benchmark dataset and refining our automated classification models.

Austrian national daily newspaper DiePresse featured the LEGION project in an in-depth science report exploring how various current research activities bring the Roman heritage of Carnuntum to life.

The LEGION project team went on a field trip to the Roman City of Carnuntum and visited the Archaeological Central Depot at Kulturfabrik Hainburg. Guided by Christian Gugl, the team gained valuable insights into ancient urban structures and extensive artifact repositories. We would like to express our sincere gratitude for the generous support from the Lower Austrian State Collections (Landessammlungen NÖ), the Center for Museum Collections Management at the University for Continuing Education Krems (UWK), and the Roman City of Carnuntum.

Our student assistant Julia Tanzer presented her ongoing Data Analysis Project (supervised by Dominik Hagmann), "Structuring Archaeological Find Drawings from Carnuntum (Austria): Ontology Building and Controlled Vocabulary within the LEGION project", at the Data Science & AI Day 2026 hosted by the University of Vienna.

Austria has officially joined the European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science (E-RIHS ERIC). Coordinated by the Austrian Archaeological Institute (OeAI / OeAW) through E-RIHS.at, this milestone strengthens international research cooperation and access to state-of-the-art facilities for cultural heritage preservation.

A delegation from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), including the LEGION project, visited the AI Factory Austria AI:AT in Vienna to explore collaboration opportunities. The visit focused on EuroHPC access, AI services, and research synergies with startups.

Dominik Hagmann presented "Reflections on AI Applications in Austrian Roman Archaeology" at the Digital Frontiers workshop, highlighting LEGION's Human-in-the-Loop approach, legacy data digitization, and the transparent, ethical use of Generative AI.

Dominik Hagmann presented our latest research at the joint Roman Archaeology Conference & Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (RAC/TRAC 2026) at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Dominik Hagmann and Irene Ballester-Campos presented LEGION at the 9th Networking Seminar of the MLA2S platform, highlighting AI-enabled identification of archaeological objects from Carnuntum.

Dominik Hagmann hosted the Second General Meeting of the MAIA COST Action in Hainburg, focusing on managing AI in archaeological research through interdisciplinary collaboration.

Announcement of the permanent LEGION poster exhibition ("Rebuilding Roman History with AI") at the Archaeological Central Depot of the Lower Austrian State Collections (Landessammlungen NÖ) in the Kulturfabrik Hainburg, showcasing our AI research and pottery digitization directly where thousands of Roman artifacts are stored.

Early project announcement regarding the upcoming release of digitised archaeological drawings from Carnuntum. Full benchmark dataset and evaluation pipeline have now been officially published as the CENTURIA dataset.

TU Wien's Computer Vision Lab advertised a Master's thesis topic on Feature Learning and Clustering for Archaeological Pottery Typology within the LEGION project, supervised by Martin Kampel and Irene Ballester. The thesis develops Machine Learning pipelines for 70,000+ Roman pottery drawings from Carnuntum, successfully bringing Master's students Anna Laczkó and Valentina Naghavi onto the team to advance our automated typochronology.