Upcoming talk · AI/ML Seminar Series
Artificial Intelligence as an Archival Science
Associate Professor, Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University
- Date & time
- Thursday, October 22, 2026 · 11:00 AM
- Location
- Donald Bren Hall 4011
Abstract
As suggested by Alison Gopnik and others (e.g., Farrell et al., 2025), large language models and similar AI artifacts are "cultural technologies". Like language and writing—and also bureaucracies, democracies, and markets—AI transforms our relationship to memory and our interactions with each other. More particularly, state-of-the-art models are trained on archives collected from the digitized human record. Model trainers are recreating, intentionally or not, processes for selection, categorization, and source criticism that resemble some archival practices. After surveying some of the consequences of this archival view of AI, this talk will present work from our research group that traces the effects of training data composition on training dynamics and of mixtures of genres on high-level LLM capabilities. I will also discuss the ways in which analyzing large-scale patterns in the human record can help us build better models, such as our Apollo model for restoring gaps in ancient Greek texts.
About the speaker
David Smith is an associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University and a founding member of Northeastern's NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences. In addition to his research in natural language processing and computational linguistics, he has worked to apply computational models to research questions in classics, history, political science, journalism, and other fields.