Marcus Bingenheimer 馬德偉 is Associate Professor of Religion at Temple University. He taught Buddhist Studies and Digital Humanities for six years in Taiwan, and held visiting positions at universities in Korea, Japan, France, Thailand, and Singapore. Since 2001, he has supervised numerous projects concerning the digitization of Buddhist culture. His main research interests are Buddhist history and historiography, early sūtra literature, and how to apply computational approaches to research in the Humanities. He has written and edited a handful of books and some sixty-five peer-reviewed articles. Currently, he is working on how to evaluate neural machine translation of Buddhist text and the effects of LLMs on Buddhist Studies in general. With Justin Brody, he will host a workshop on Embeddings and Machine Translation.
Fritz Breithaupt is provost professor with a split appointment in cognitive sciences and Germanic Studies at Indiana University. He directs the Experimental Humanities Lab. His research focusses on empathy and narrative thinking. Among his books are The Dark Sides of Empathy (2019) and The narrative Brain (2025). The latter book received the distinction of Science Book of the Year in Austria. Lately, he and his lab have examined differences in human and AI forms of storytelling and retelling (Breithaupt et al., “Humans create more novelty than ChatGPT when asked to retell a story,” 2024). In this and other studies, he and his colleagues use AI-based insights as basis of comparison to better understand human uniqueness. He will present a paper on “Humans have experiences, AI does not. Does it matter?”
Justin Brody is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Franklin and Marshall College. His primary research area is in various aspects of artificial intelligence, especially in exploring techniques which combine "slow" symbolic reasoning with "fast" connectionist models. He has a longstanding interest in Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy, and he is particularly interested in dialogues between these traditions and contemporary mathematics and computer science.
Laurent Dubreuil is the Founding Director of the Humanities Lab at Cornell University, where he is a Professor of Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, and Cognitive Science. He is also the IWLC Sr. International Chair of Transcultural Theory at Tsinghua University. The author of more than fifteen scholarly books, Dubreuil is soon publishing an essay entitled Humanities in the Time of AI (U of Minnesota P: 2025). He is currently spearheading “Mechanema,” a new book series on AI and the Humanities with Cornell UP. He has recently served as a PI for a comparative inquiry on poetry generation and creation involving GPT and humans (on which he wrote the article “Metal Machine Music” for Harper’s Magazine) and for a hybrid NLP-qualitative investigation of the lexicon of race and indigeneity in French.
David Dunning is a historian of science and technology whose research focuses on computing and logic in modern America and Europe. He is curator of history of science at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, working closely with the mathematics and computing collections. He is currently working on a book, Writing the Rules of Reason: The Social Life of Notation from Logic to AI, which explores how methods of writing have shaped understandings of natural and artificial reasoning alike.
Leonardo Flores is Chair of the English Department at Appalachian State University. His research areas are electronic literature, with a focus on e-poetry, digital writing, and the history and strategic growth of the field. He’s known for I ♥ E-Poetry, theElectronic Literature Collection, Volume 3, “Third Generation Electronic Literature” and the Antología Lit(e)Lat, Volume 1. He is a member of the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on AI and Writing and has offered numerous invited talks and workshops on AI and its impact on education, policy, scholarship, and creativity. For more information on his current work, visit leonardoflores.net.
Yulia Frumer is the Bo Jung and Soon Young Kim Associate Professor of East Asian Science and Technology, and the chair of the History of Science and Technology Department, Johns Hopkins University. Frumer is an historian of science and technology in East Asia. She explores technological developments in Japan from the early modern period to the 21st century, focusing on scientific practices, material epistemology, as well as the role of emotion and cognition in scientific and technological decision-making. In her current research, Frumer examines the development of Japanese robotics, and explores the emotional and psychological factors that affected robotic designs and human-machine interaction. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious fellowships, including the Japanese Society for Promotion of Science, and the National Science Foundation. Frumer is interested in AI tools that could offer us a better understanding of the historically situated meanings of words, including their associations and emotional valences. She was the recipient of the AI seed grant from Johns Hopkins’ Data Science Institute, which she used to examine the potential use of LLMs for historical analysis.
Mar Hicks (virtual) is an author, historian, and professor doing research on hidden histories of computing, as well as the history of labor and technology. Hicks is currently an Associate Professor at The University of Virginia's School of Data Science, in Charlottesville, teaching courses on the history of technology, computing and society, and the larger implications of powerful and widespread digital infrastructures. Hicks is interested in stories that change the core narratives of the history of computing in unexpected ways. Their multiple award-winning book, Programmed Inequality, looks at how the British lost their early lead in computing by discarding women computer workers, and what this cautionary tale tells us about current issues in high tech. Their new work looks at resistance and cycles of harm in the history of technology, from the earliest electronic computers through the current attempts to deploy generative AI. Hicks is also co-editor of the book Your Computer Is On Fire (MIT Press, 2021), a volume of essays about how we can begin to fix our broken high tech infrastructures. Other writing and more information can be found at: marhicks.com. Their interest in AI revolves around the labor implications of this automating technology and how it is currently poised to replace workers even if it cannot fulfill the same functions and cannot function well or reliably.
Jeffrey West Kirkwood is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author of Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900(2022), the co-editor of Ernst Kapp’s Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture(2018), and a co-editor of the special issue of Critical Inquiry on “Surplus Data.” His work been published in October, Grey Room, Texte zur Kunst, and elsewhere. He has also been a Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, the Bauhaus University, and the IKKM. He is interested broadly in concepts of efficiency in computational practices involving language.
Loren Ludwig is currently involved in a research project with some colleagues at Johns Hopkins that seeks to use LLMs to evaluate a corpus of thousands of short essays on ‘wonder’ submitted as part of student applications to the JH School of Medicine. They see the research as having two “branches”—one is specific to various research questions about the capacity for wonder as predictive of various kinds of success in medical school (as well as the application process) and whether the essay prompt and application process successfully measure the capacity for wonder in a meaningful way, the second is developing a map for “best practices” in the use of AI and LLMs in this sort of social science/humanities research. For example, they set up several experiments to compare qualitative code books created by human readers of the essays vs various LLMs to help them understand how to think about “gaps” between these two methods of evaluating the essays and how/whether LLMs can actually supplement/enhance the work of human readers/coders.
Junjie Luo is associate professor of East Asian Studies and the Director of the Johnson Center for Creative Teaching and Learning at Gettysburg College. His research explores the transnational and transcultural dimensions of traditional Chinese literature. He is the author of Traditional Chinese Fiction in the English-Speaking World: Transcultural and Translingual Encounters and has published in journals such as Comparative Literature Studies, Perspectives, and ISLE. His scholarly interests extend to the intersections of technology and literary studies. He has taught the data science course, “Cultural Analytics,” served on the Program Committee for the 2022 Chesapeake Digital Humanities Consortium Conference, and is a member of the Modern Language Association Task Force on World Languages and Generative AI.
Ruth Mostern (virtual) is Professor of History and Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh and Vice President and President Elect of the World History Association. She is the author of Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State, 960-1276 CE (Harvard Asia Center, 2011), and The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale University Press, 2021), winner of the Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2022. She is also co-editor of Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana University Press, 2016. Ruth is Principal Investigator and Project Director of the World Historical Gazetteer, a prize-winning digital infrastructure platform for integrating databases of historical place name information. She will be presenting on “Affordances for Dataset Alignment and Named Entity Recognition with the World Historical Gazetteer?”
Anna Preus is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Washington, where she studies and teaches early 20th-century British and Anglophone literature and data science in the humanities. She is especially interested in how historical print cultures are being transferred online through large- and small-scale text digitization efforts. Anna is co-editor of a digital edition of Hope Mirrlees’s modernist long poem, Paris, and she is currently at a work on a book titled Publishing Empire: Colonial Authorship and British Literature, 1900-1940. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in ELH: English Literary History, EMNLP Findings, Feminist Modernist Studies, and Modernism/Modernity Print Plus. At UW, she leads the Humanities Data Lab, serves as core faculty in the Textual Studies program, and is a Data Science Fellow with the eScience Institute. She will be co-presenting with Melanie Walsh.
Jann Ronis is the executive director of the Buddhist Digital Resource Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to seeking out, preserving, documenting, and disseminating Buddhist literature.
Richard Jean So is associate professor of English and digital humanities at McGill University. He has published humanistic articles in Critical Inquiry and PMLA, scientific papers and proceedings in PNAS and ACL, and public-facing essays in The New York Times and Atlantic. His most recent book is Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (Columbia UP 2021), and he's currently working on a series of papers and new book on "Cultural AI." On this topic (as well as its cousin, "Humanistic AI"), he is helping to lead workshops organized in the United Kingdom at the Turing Institute and the Neubauer Collegium at the U of Chicago.
Kwok-Leong Tang is the Managing Director of the Digital China Initiative and a lecturer for the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a Ph.D. in history and Asian Studies from Pennsylvania State University. In recent years, he has focused on exploring the potential of new technologies in humanities research. Over the last two years, he has organized and instructed workshops on adopting GenAI in Chinese studies and humanities research at Harvard and other institutions.
Melanie Walsh is an Assistant Professor in the Information School and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Washington. She is co-PI of the AI for Humanists project and co-editor of the Post45 Data Collective. She is the author of the open-source textbook, Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python, and she is currently working on a book about the social media afterlives of postwar American authors.
Emily T. Yeh is a professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is currently writing about global geographies of weather modification in the context of climate change adaptation and growing conversations about geoengineering. Much of her past research has concerned development and nature-society relations in Tibetan parts of the PRC, including the political ecology of pastoralism, emergent environmentalisms, the cultural politics of entrepreneurship, indigenous knowledge, and climate justice. Her book Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development explored the intersection of the political economy and cultural politics of development as a project of state territorialization. Her interest in AI is largely one of concerns and alarm about a range of issues including intensive energy consumption in the face of the crisis of global heating, theft of intellectual property, the pitfalls of techno-optimism, misinformation, and its use in warfare and violence.
Bo Zhao is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. His research spans Humanistic Geographic Information Science (GIScience), GeoAI, and Fake Geographies, with a particular focus on how Deepfake Geography reshapes spatial understanding in social, political, and ethical contexts. His work on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in geography explores both its transformative potential and the ethical challenges of spatial data generation. He investigates how AI generates, manipulates, and verifies geographic information, examining the risks associated with fake maps, deepfake satellite imagery, and geospatial data manipulation, as well as AI’s role in promoting geographic equity and social justice. Additionally, his research delves into Digital Twins and their applications in urban planning, environmental monitoring, and governance, critically assessing their implications for spatial modeling and prediction. Within Humanistic GIS, he examines how AI is reshaping human relationships with geographic space. His research explores AI’s potential in mapping, urban simulation, and geographic storytelling, while also considering how GeoAI redefines interactions between human and non-human entities within geographic environments.