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Humanities and AI Virtual Institute Copy

Bridging the gap between humanities scholarship and AI capabilities

Current AI models struggle with multilingual contexts, multimodal datasets, and the nuances of historical and cultural diversity, hindering their application in humanities disciplines. HAVI aims to address these limitations by fostering interdisciplinary collaborations between AI and humanities researchers, focused on developing and applying new AI techniques to accelerate humanities scholarship.

Opportunities for Funding

2026 Humanities and Artificial Intelligence Virtual Institute (HAVI) RFP

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The Challenge

HAVI aims to address challenges in two core areas: humanities scholarship and AI development.

For Humanities Scholarship
Humanistic research is challenging, demanding significant time, energy, and resources to analyze extensive sources for insightful conclusions. However, AI tools present limitations for humanities researchers, as the technology often prioritizes uniformity, often erasing the cultural, material, and perceptual differences that are essential to humanistic research. We believe that combining traditional methods with AI and data-driven approaches can greatly expand access to scholarly resources and enable more rigorous, data-informed research outcomes in the humanities.
For AI Development
AI models face challenges in multilingual and multimodal contexts common in the humanities. Current AI also struggles with the diverse nature of historical situations, cultural viewpoints, languages, aesthetics, and ambiguities prevalent in humanities scholarship. Conversely, humanities disciplines offer extensive knowledge in areas where AI is weak, such as complex human reasoning, narrative style, metaphorical understanding, and evaluating excellence in ambiguous fields like art and literature. We believe that integrating this humanistic knowledge can significantly advance and improve AI technology.