This past fall, the Jewish Education Project, with generous funding from the AVI CHAI Foundation, challenged Jewish high school students across the country to propose creative solutions for enhancing Judaics learning through technology. Our project is called Adding Nekudot to Rashi & Tosafot by us - Taylor Jacob Bean ‘18, Yonah Freiden ‘18, and Justin Wolff ‘18.
Our project's primary goal is to add diacritical signs (Nekudot) to Rashi script. When students study Jewish texts, students often find difficulty in interpreting the langauge because of its lack of nekudot. Our AI technology-driven solution, therefore, attempts to facilitate learning within the classrooms of Jewish students around the world. We are elated to initiate a project that we believe will fundamentally alter the terrain that is Jewish studies.
So soon after we learned that we were awarded a joint grant to pursue these projects, we enthusiastically began designing and constructing a state-of-the-art computer featuring the most advanced hardware available for a deep learning desktop: NVIDIA’s TITAN V graphics processing unit (GPU), capable of 110 TeraFLOPS (110,000,000,000,000 mathematical operations per second), which is ten times faster than the leading available GPU.
While our first attempt at contacting Nvidia to receive their GPU for free did not work as planned, they graciously offered us free deep-learning web-courses for us to work on.
Now that the custom-built computer has been built, we are tackling a multi-pronged image recognition problem related to adding nekudot (vowels) to fragmented sentences in Talmudic commentaries written in Rashi script, which need to later be converted to block font for ease of reading via an app.
As noted above, we will be using Google’s open source TensorFlow platform to train our algorithms after utilizing NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute’s training classes, with access credits donated to the groups by the NVIDIA Foundation. We hope that our project will engender feelings of pride when students of all ages study talmudic and biblical sources. Both novice scholars and textual experts, we hope, will gain a better understanding of commentaries that are traditionally studied only in Rashi Script without nekudot.
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