AI-teh seminars

For this monthly seminar series, we invite colleagues from the Humanities and Social Sciences to present how they have leveraged artificial intelligence in their own research methodology. The seminars are practically oriented demonstrations of instances of implementing AI at any stage of research, including data preparation, annotation, analysis or anything else. The seminars should serve as a platform not only to showcase uses of AI and get feedback on this, but also for participants to get inspiration for their own research and potentially as an opportunity to further collaboration.

Upcoming seminars

May 11, 16:00-17:30 EEST. AI-teh #1: Maciej Eder, Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities (UT Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics)
Digital Humanities and AI: A Showcase
Jakobi 2-438 & Zoom. Register here.

The AI world is developing so fast that any topic that seems relevant today, might be outdated tomorrow. With this in mind, the presentation will focus on two actual case studies that used early-stage Transformer-based models, approached by trial and error. The first case is a project of translating (any) written text into sign language gestures (also known as glosses) that can then be animated using avatar technology. An example of translating written Polish into the Polish Sign Language will be presented, for it exhibits an extreme training data scarcity challenge. The second case study is a relatively large (+250k bibliographic entries) yet entirely unstructured database of all the prints published in Poland in 16th-19th centuries (in many different languages). By instructing a language model how to retrieve relevant data about the publication year and the publication place from thousands of unstructured title pages, we are able to reconstruct the history of the printing centres from a bird’s eye view. Some challenges of making the model understand historical variants of several languages, will be presented.

Photo: Andres Tennus

June 8, 16:00-17:30 EEST. AI-teh #2: Andres Karjus, Associate Professor of Computational Social Science (UT Institute of Social Studies)
AI in Research: from Annotators to Assistants and Agents
Ülikooli 18-139 & Zoom. Register here.

The seminar series will continue in the autumn. In the autumn semester, we will meet every first Monday of the month (16:00-17:30).