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.

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. Slides available 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The AI world is developing so fast that any topic that seems relevant today, might be outdated tomorrow.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. Materials: slides, research paper generated during the meeting. The event was also recorded and can be watched on YouTube.

The seminar series will continue in September. In the autumn semester, we will meet every first Monday of the month at 16:00-17:30 at Jakobi 2-114 and Zoom.

Preliminary agenda for autumn 2026:

07.09. Nina Tahmasebi, Professor of Computational Linguistics (University of Gothenburg) (Zoom only!)
05.10. Kaarel Sikk, Research Fellow in Archaeology (UT Institute of History and Archaeology) & Research Fellow in Complex Systems (UT Institute of Genomics)
02.11. Krister Kruusmaa, AI Alignment Lead (Institute of the Estonian Language) & Visiting Lecturer in AI and Digital Humanities (Tallinn University)
07.12. Alan Voodla, Junior Research Fellow in Psychology (UT Institute of Psychology)

Titles and additional information will be added in August.
Please register your participation in the seminar series: https://forms.office.com/e/KFQViWhGGN. Additional information and a Zoom link will be sent before each seminar.

The seminar series is organised by DigiTS. DigiTS is a project funded by the European Union under grant agreement ID 101186601.