Project: Algolit

Algoliterary Lectures

In the framework of Algoliterary Encounters, we will be hosting two lectures on Friday 10 November.

  • Generative Models and the Digital Humanities: Towards Synthetic Literature, by Mike Kestemont

Mike Kestemont is assistant professor in the department of literature at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He is a researcher in computational text analysis, in particular for historic texts. Authorship attribution is one of his main areas of expertise. He designs computational algorithms which can automatically identify the authors of anonymous texts through the quantitative analysis of individual writing styles.
For the yearly event ’The Netherlands Read!’ he co-designed Asibot, a writing tool trained with Recurrent Neural Networks, based on +4000 Dutch novels. The tool was used by Dutch novelist Ronald Giphart to write an extra fiction story for the re-edition of Asimov’s ’I Robot’ in the beginning of November.
Mike will present recent advances in Machine Learning - and its changing cultural status - with an emphasis on generative models, i.e. models that synthetizes new artificial data, instead of mere modelling pre-existing data. This will include a survey of some ongoing ethical discussions in the world of AI.

  • The ORES-project of Wikipedia, by Amir Sarabadani

Software engineer Amir Sarabadani will present the ORES-project. "The Objective Revision Evaluation Service" is a web service and API that provides machine learning as a service for Wikimedia projects maintained by the Scoring Platform team. The system is designed to help automate critical wiki-work - for example: vandalism detection and removal. Currently, the two general types of scores that ORES generates are in the context of ’edit quality’ and ’article quality’.
Amir has been active for Wikipedia since 2006, as sysop, bureaucrat and check user for the Persian Wikipedia, and developer for Wikimedia projects. He is operator of Dexbot and one of the developers of the pywikibot framework, and works as a software engineer in Wikimedia Germany. Amir was born in 1992 in Tehran, Iran and studied physics. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany.


@ Maison du Livre

Rue de Rome straat 24-28, 1060 Brussels