The 600,000 square miles that make up modern-day Mongolia have become a field site for the Valley of the Khans project, led by UCSD research scientist Albert Yu-Min Lin. It started as a search for the lost burial site of Genghis Khan, but it has now become something bigger – an effort to demonstrate that noninvasive, nondestructive technologies can help Mongolia locate and protect lost heritage sites and artifacts without ever digging them up. One of the project's sponsors, National Geographic Society, collaborated with computer scientists from Calit2 to develop a 'human computation' component, also known as crowdsourcing, under which the public is invited to help the ground expedition by entering a game interface on the National Geographic website to look at satellite images of Mongolia and tag any anomalies in the country's topography that might indicate previous man-made structures beneath the ground. So far, more than 10,000 armchair archaeologists have used the UCSD-made interface, making it one of the largest crowdsourcing efforts of its kind. A TV documentary about the first three years of the Valley of the Khans project is scheduled to air on the National Geographic Channel in November 2011, and Mongolia is expected to remain an IGERT-TEECH Field Site as future expeditions rely on ever-newer technologies and crowdsourcing observations to make future archaeological finds in the region.
"Combining GeoEye-1 Satellite Remote Sensing, UAV Aerial Imaging, and Geophysical Surveys in Anomaly Detection Applied to Archaeology," Albert Yu-Min Lin, Alexandre Novo, Shar Har-Noy, Nathan D. Ricklin and Kostas Stamatiou
Oct 10, 2011"A Virtual Excavation: Combining 3D Immersive Virtual Reality and Geophysical Surveying," Albert Yu-Min Lin, Alexandre Novo, Philip P. Weber, Gianfranco Morelli, Dean Goodman and Jurgen P. Schulze
"Combining GeoEye-1 Satellite Remote Sensing, UAV Aerial Imagining, and Geophysical Surveys in Anomal Detection Applied to the Archaeology," Albert Lin, Novo, A.,Har-Noy, S., Ricklin, N., & Stamatiou, K