Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie will deliver the Tsukuba iSchool Distinguished Lecture on June 3 at the University of Tsukuba in Japan.
Downie, who serves as co-director of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), will present "Making More Sense with Machines: AI in the Library." The talk will highlight research projects led by the HTRC that engage with AI collaboratively, critically, and practically, and that reflect on the promise and limitations of leveraging AI for humanities research using the massive HathiTrust Digital Library. Research to be discussed includes recent AI-based projects on textual reconstructivity, long-document classification and summarization, and experimental LLM-based chatbots that may be useful as knowledge experts for well-defined corpora.
"In my lecture, I will describe some of the AI-enhanced processes used in the day-to-day work of the Center as it creates open data for the research community. I will also present a major new essay collection, Navigating AI for Cultural Heritage Organisations, that my HTRC colleagues and I co-edited and co-authored," Downie said.
Downie serves as principal investigator on the HathiTrust + Bookworm text analysis project, joint principal investigator for TORCHLITE, and co-principal investigator for SCWAReD. In addition to his contributions to digital libraries and digital humanities research, Downie is known for helping to establish a vibrant music information retrieval research community. He is the founder and first president of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR). Downie holds a bachelor's degree in music theory and composition, along with master's and doctoral degrees in library and information science, all from the University of Western Ontario.