$33.5K awarded in July

Following the major announcement at the end of June—and the launch of a new phase of the Vesuvius Challenge with a prize pool of more than $2.1 million—the community responded with great enthusiasm!

The team reviewed 58 submissions for open-source Progress Prize contributions.

After careful evaluation, $33,500 has been awarded to 13 teams and individual contributors. As promised, the best submission of the month received $20,000. We will continue awarding this prestigious prize to the top contribution each month until the deadline at the end of June 2027.

Over the past month, the community focused on developing and improving alternative virtual-unwrapping pipelines and integrating them with VC3D, our specialized software for digitally unrolling the scrolls. Other valuable contributions included bug fixes, consistency improvements, and metadata checks.

ScrollFiesta (Ben Kyles & collaborators), for various improvements to per-cube meshing, welding, surface parameterisation, and snapping of meshes based on raw CT intensity. The pipeline also now directly ingests our zarr volumes and outputs tifxyz patches, and is more deeply integrated with VC3D, so it can be used in conjunction with other tooling.

• Will Stevens, for significant advancements in his unwrapping pipeline, in particular an annealing-based optimisation to find consistently-connected regions from noisy patches. This pipeline now also produces tifxyz surfaces that are compatible with our VC3D-based tooling.

• TAUIL Abd Elilah, for several useful PRs on villa including ROI inference

• Hyojun Kwon, for an update to the ink tutorial that includes proper validation data

• Alan Thompson, for GPU acceleration of ScrollFiesta’s MLS-midpoint projection

• Prasad Khake, for PRs improving zarr reading

• Shuhan Yang, for a patch to the spiral-fitter so it works on consumer GPUs

• J. Miguel Giraldo, for vectorizing the decohesion augmentation in vesuvius trainer

• Nicolas Dolegieviez, for several small fixes to the spiral fitter

• Matteo Bulloni, for a tool to check metadata in our open data catalog

• Erwin Nieuwlaar, for a tool to fix tifxyz metadata, and an upstream fix to one source of incorrect metadata

• Josep Carrera, for a tool that detects intersections in tifxyz patches

• Aviad Cohen, for another tool that checks tifxyz metadata, and a small bounds fix in VC3D

The main open prizes are still unclaimed:

1. $1M Grand Prize to virtually unwrap and make readable a full scroll

2. $50K First Letters prizes to make readable 10 letters in a scroll in the eligible set (10 prizes available)

For additional details regarding terms and conditions visit our website.

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