Schmidt Sciences Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) announced 19 new projects funded, two of which include faculty from the UW. The first is a Classical Japanese orthography project co-led by Paul S. Atkins at the University of Washington and Tomo Miyazaki at Tohoku University (TU). The second is a project that seeks to create AI capable of extracting images and paired text from over 100 million pages of U.S. federal government documents held within the End of Term Web Archive, opening up significant new avenues for scholarship. Benjamin Lee and Melanie Walsh, assistant professors in the UW Information School, are two of the scholars on the project.
Using AI to reconstruct a marble map of Rome that shattered in 226 AD. Analyzing sperm whale calls for evidence of vowels and regional accents. Drawing on ancient records to understand why some societies endured climate stress while others faced famine. These are among the 19 projects that will receive $10 million from Schmidt Sciences to bring artificial intelligence to bear on some of the humanities’ most stubborn puzzles and help researchers develop and test new AI capabilities while making their work open source. Teams will openly share the tools and resources they develop, including code, model weights and benchmark datasets.