The purpose of HAVI is to provide philanthropic resources to (1) catalyze groundbreaking, domain-specific research outcomes from humanities scholars through the integral application of AI-inspired tools and techniques; and (2) produce insights and techniques from the humanities that will advance the development of AI generally.
HAVI seeks to produce these outcomes by encouraging foundational, collaborative contributions from humanities scholars working together with AI researchers. We expect complementary research teams working in close collaboration to produce advances both in AI and in the humanities. Humanities scholars should play integral roles in the development and use of AI methods, and AI researchers should develop a deeper understanding of data, models, and problem spaces from a humanistic perspective and for humanistic applications.
HAVI expects that this collaborative approach will deepen our understanding of fundamental constraints and limitations of current approaches, leading to the advancement of future systems and breakthrough results in both AI and humanities scholarship. For example, the tendency of AI systems to reinforce existing solutions and behaviors rather than to find novel, varied, individualized outcomes is a challenging drawback that poses serious limitations on future systems. Emerging systems are attempting to overcome lack of novelty with brute force effort (massive trial and error) over vast search spaces. But directed, curated, contextualized cues from deep humanistic understanding presents an additional avenue for advancement. HAVI hopes to motivate interdisciplinary, collaborative teams that will forge ambitious new pathways for understanding and overcoming the limitations posed by such homogenizing tendencies. Likewise, AI approaches that struggle to operate in and fully exploit the richness and complexity of multilingual contexts and multimodal datasets presents a monumental future challenge for next-generation methods. HAVI will encourage collaborative, interdisciplinary research teams who will work on fundamental problems and projects to overcome such obstacles and thereby unlock transformational outcomes in both the humanities and in AI.
We expect that the resources available through HAVI will fuel new ways to overcome barriers between disciplines; develop and make available exciting, rich, multimodal datasets; change the thinking of AI researchers – and lead to new approaches – through a humanities-first understanding of data, models, and processes; and reveal crucial insights about how humanities can and should shape next-generation AI.
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¹ We refer to the broad definition of the humanities by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the only Federal Agency in the United States dedicated to funding the humanities: https://www.neh.gov/about
