Talk by James Smithies: "Harnessing AI"
May 22nd, 2025
Join us on Thursday, May 22nd, 2025 for a talk by James Smithies, Professor of Digital Humanities & Director of the HASS Digital Research Hub (HDRH) at The Australian University. "Harnessing AI: Evaluating LLM-RAG Systems for Humanities Research" will discuss ATLAS (Analysis and Testing of Language Models for Archival Systems), an open-source "test harness" for conducting reproducible and transparent experiments with multiple LLMs and text corpora. A key output of the transnational AI as Infrastructure (AIINFRA) project, ATLAS aims to expose LLM Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to transparent and holistic analysis, and demonstrate the continued value of open source tinkering and experimentation.
Critical AI Graduate Conference
March 11th, 2025
Join us on Tuesday, March 11th, from 3:00-6:00 PM for a graduate conference, featuring presentations by participants in Co-Director Fabian Offert's "Critical Theory and/of Artificial Intelligence" seminar. Graduate students from departments including Comparative Literature, Media Arts & Technology, Spanish & Portuguese, English, and more will share their research and perspectives on social, political, and aesthetic implications of AI. All are welcome to attend.
HUML Launch Event with Hannes Bajohr
January 24th, 2025
We hosted the inaugural event of the Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning (HUML) on Friday, January 24th from 3:00-5:00 PM in the Henley Board Room in Mosher Alumni House. Hannes Bajohr, Assistant Professor of German at UC Berkeley, gave a keynote titled, “Surface Reading LLMs: Synthetic Text and its Styles,” followed by a Q&A. Bajohr’s extensive work on artificial intelligence and digital writing technologies includes co-editing a recent special volume of Text+Kritik (“The Subject of Writing: On Large Language Models”) and a 2023 novel, Berlin, Miami, written in cooperation with a self-trained language model. HUML Co-Directors Fabian Offert (Germanic and Slavic Studies/Comparative Literature) and Rita Raley (English) discussed their upcoming book projects on image and language models, respectively, followed by a reception with light refreshments.