HumAI’s First Guest Lecture: Cracking Hidden Codes and Undeciphered Languages
Join Us for HumAI’s First Guest Lecture: Cracking Hidden Codes and Undeciphered Languages We’re excited to welcome Beáta Megyesi, Professor of Computational Linguistics at Stockholm University, for the opening talk in our HumAI seminar series. Beáta will explore how artificial intelligence can support humanistic research—and how humanistic perspectives can shape AI. Using computational methods to analyze hidden codes and unknown languages, she will show how hybrid approaches combining neural models with linguistic and philological expertise can tackle sparse and uncertain data.
Many texts remain only partially understood, encoded, or written in undeciphered scripts and languages. Working with such material challenges traditional linguistic methods and calls for closer collaboration between the humanities and AI.
This talk examines how AI can support humanistic research—and how humanistic perspectives can shape AI—through computational methods for analyzing hidden codes and unknown languages.
”Drawing on the DESCRYPT project, I show how hybrid approaches that combine neural models with linguistic and philological expertise can work effectively with sparse and uncertain data, while also highlighting the limits of AI and the continuing role of human interpretation”, says Beáta Megyesi.
Beáta Megyesi is Professor of Computational Linguistics at Stockholm University. She earned her Ph.D. from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and served as associate and full professor at Uppsala University. She has led numerous externally funded research initiatives and is Principal Investigator of DECRYPT (Swedish Research Council, 2018–2024) and DESCRYPT (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, 2025–2032), projects that advance computational methods and research infrastructures for historical cryptology and the automatic analysis of rare scripts.
Her previous leadership roles include President of the Northern European Association for Language Technology, Chair of the Linguistics Review Panel at the Swedish Research Council, and Head of the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Uppsala University.
Don’t miss this opportunity to dive into the intersection of technology and the humanities! Welcome.