Jump to content
Forside

News

Professor Ted Underwood is visiting AAU for a keynote on generative AI in the social sciences and humanities

Photo: Private

MASSHINE is proud to announce Professor Ted Underwood as the first keynote speaker at the conference: Generative Methods – AI as collaborator and companion in the social sciences and humanities.

News

Professor Ted Underwood is visiting AAU for a keynote on generative AI in the social sciences and humanities

Photo: Private

MASSHINE is proud to announce Professor Ted Underwood as the first keynote speaker at the conference: Generative Methods – AI as collaborator and companion in the social sciences and humanities.

Photo: Private

One of the leading figures in digital humanities is visiting Aalborg University. 
 
Ted Underwood is Professor at the School of Information Sciences and the Department of English at the University of Illinois. 
 
During the past decade he has pioneered the use of computational methods for the analysis of English literature, including text-mining, distant reading and, more recently, generative AI. 
 
From December 6-8 MASSHINE is organizing the Generative Methods conference which explores the consequences of generative AI for SSH research methods.

Here you can meet Ted Underwood as one of the keynote speakers.   
 
A key voice in computational literary studies 
 
Professor Underwood's 2019 book Distant Horizons is one of the seminal works in distant reading and demonstrates how unsolved questions in literary studies can be tackled in new ways through machine learning techniques and natural language processing on large digital libraries. 
 
Another key contribution has been his work on “perspectival modelling”, i.e., the training of machine learning models to absorb human perspective rather than represent a neutral point of view.  
 
Ted Underwood thus urges researchers in the humanities to think of the ability of AI to reproduce partial perspectives not just as bias but also as a methodological strength. 
 
One of his recent experiments include the use of GPT4 (the large language model currently powering Open AI’s ChatGPT) to measure the passage of time in fiction.

GENERATIVE METHODS - AI as collaborator and companion in the social sciences and humanities

The advent of generative AI, such as large language models, chat bots, and text-to-image generation, has presented both opportunities and challenges for society. This conference seeks to explore the multifaceted impact of generative AI as instruments and objects of research. Want to know more?

Link to the conference