A research group led by Matthew Wilkens, associate professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, is the recent recipient of a Schmidt Sciences award to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) in the humanities to unlock new insights in human history and culture.
Wilkens will lead a team of researchers, including David Mimno, chair and professor of information science, on a project called, “Artificial Intelligence for Cultural and Historical Reasoning,” which will aim to create and develop benchmarks for AI models that can faithfully reflect distinct cultural contexts and historical periods. They will use them to study cultural and intellectual change, enabling experimental approaches to historical questions where only observational evidence has been available. Wilkens’ team is one of 23 to receive awards and funding support, totaling $11 million, through Schmidt Sciences’ Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) program.
Wilkens, who co-leads Cornell’s Culture and Computation Lab, uses AI, natural language processing, and other computational techniques to mine entire digital libraries for insights into society and culture.