Rajesh Rao is fascinated by "the mother of all crossword puzzles": how to decipher the 4000-year-old Indus script. He's enlisting modern computation to try to read this lost language, the key to understanding this ancient civilization.

Rajesh P.N. Rao is the CJ and Elizabeth Hwang Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering, and co-Director of the Center for Neurotechnology at the University of Washington. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholar award, an NSF CAREER award, a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Na...