Talk, Institute for Indology and Tibetology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany
I gave a presentation on the current capabilities and future developments of Dharmamitra at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The event also included a hands-on workshop titled “Accelerated Sanskrit Textual Scholarship in the Age of Agentic AI,” led by Kengo Harimoto (University of Naples “L’Orientale”).
Workshop, Workshop in Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
I led a workshop in Leipzig focused on the use of artificial intelligence in Buddhist Studies, with particular emphasis on the research tool Dharmamitra and its application to philological work on Buddhist textual material.
Talk, Ahiṃsā Lecture Series, Asia-Africa Institute (ESA W 221), University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
I gave this talk as part of the Ahiṃsā Lecture Series, a Hamburg–Kyoto blended-learning partnership exploring nonviolence as a globally relevant ethical framework. We are living in an age where an ever-increasing amount of digitally available data and rapidly advancing AI tools are fundamentally changing the way research on textual material of Asian traditions is undertaken. This fundamental transition holds clear dangers: AI systems are, in many respects, systems that amplify existing trends and patterns in the data they are trained on, and the profit-oriented nature of the companies behind the most popular applications raises serious questions about their trustworthiness when it comes to adequate knowledge representation. In this talk I examined how Digital Humanities and AI can function as a bridge to reduce bias and inequality, and how crucial the development of independent, transparent systems with openly accessible datasets is for ensuring a positive impact of these technologies on scholarship. Framing nonviolence (ahiṃsā) as a practical concern for research infrastructures, I argued that “doing less harm” in this context means building tools that broaden access while making their assumptions, sources, and limitations visible.
Workshop, Center for Integrated Japanese Studies (CIJS), Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
I co-organized this international workshop with Prof. Ryuta Kikuya at the Center for Integrated Japanese Studies (CIJS) at Tohoku University, focusing on philology and digital archives in the age of AI. The workshop covered computer-aided annotation workflows, Sanskrit studies utilizing generative AI, and the digitization of Tibetan, Nepalese, and Japanese Esoteric Buddhist texts.
Talk, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
I gave this lecture at Ghent University as part of the two-day workshop “Japanese Studies in Japan and Belgium” (March 19–20, 2026), hosted by the Center for Integrated Japanese Studies (CIJS) at Tohoku University and co-organized with the Ghent University Institute for Japanese Studies. The talk introduced Dharmamitra as a platform supporting research across language boundaries on Buddhist textual material.
Talk, Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
I gave a guest lecture at the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies on the invitation of Charles DiSimone, as part of the Gandhāra Corpora Lecture Series and the Spring 2026 Permanent Training in Buddhist Studies. The talk examined DharmaNexus as a database tracking intertextual relationships between passages across languages and sources, discussed key design choices and how intertextual relationships are determined and represented, demonstrated research applications for discovering parallels in Buddhist texts, and addressed limitations of AI-assisted multilingual systems in this context.
Talk, International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands
I delivered a hybrid lecture at the International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden University. With rapidly growing digital collections and increasingly powerful AI and information-retrieval tools, textual Buddhist Studies is undergoing a paradigm shift. The talk reflected on what this shift means for the future of the field and the role of philological scholarship in an age of generative AI.
Conference proceedings talk, Doshisha University Osaka Satellite Campus, Osaka, Japan
I presented at the 30th Information and Knowledge Science Forum at the Doshisha University Osaka Satellite Campus. The talk introduced Dharmamitra as a data-driven platform for studying Buddhist texts across multiple languages using advanced NLP methods.
Conference proceedings talk, Faculty of Letters Building, Lecture Room 7, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
I co-presented with Kengo Harimoto (University of Naples “L’Orientale”) at the 32nd Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the History of Indian Thought. The talk introduced Dharmamitra and DharmaNexus and discussed their application in Indological and Buddhological research. The event was held in a hybrid face-to-face and online format.
Symposium, 仏教学とデジタル・ヒューマニティーズ国際シンポジウム (Buddhist Studies and Digital Humanities International Symposium), Tokyo, Japan
I presented on the current status and future outlook of the Dharmamitra ecosystem, covering translation, OCR, and semantic retrieval capabilities for Buddhist texts. The symposium was held at Tokyo International Forum Hall D5 and focused on “The Significance of Humanities and Research Infrastructure Development in the DX-AI Era.”
Symposium, 11th Symposium of Humanistic Buddhism, Taiwan
I presented on the Dharmamitra platform as part of the panel “AI in the Fo Guang Dictionary of Buddhism English Translation Project and MITRA.” The panel showcased how emerging AI tools support large-scale Buddhist translation and lexicographical research. I introduced Dharmamitra as a collaborative AI-driven platform developed by Tohoku University with the Tsadra Foundation and Berkeley AI Research Lab, which employs Large Language Models for high-quality machine translation of Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, and Chinese alongside vector-based semantic retrieval.
Workshop, Workshop and Symposium, Center for Integrated Japanese Studies (CIJS), Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
I presented as part of the Digital Archive Research Unit at the Center for Integrated Japanese Studies (CIJS) at Tohoku University. The workshop and symposium was co-hosted by CIJS, the Tohoku University Digital Archives Steering Committee, and the Tohoku University Library. I delivered a lecture and participated in a panel discussion on the digitization of academic resources in Tohoku University and new developments in Buddhist textual studies with AI technology.
Talk, 서울대학교 인공지능 디지털인문학센터 해외연구자 초청포럼 (Seoul National University AI Digital Humanities Center Overseas Researcher Invitation Forum), Seoul, South Korea
Talk, Goodman Lecture Series No. 32, Khyentse Foundation, Online
Recent advances in machine learning, particularly the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, are rapidly shaping new ways of accessing and interpreting knowledge preserved in textual form. This has far-reaching implications for the study of the Buddhist textual tradition. Applications once considered decades away, such as the fluent machine translation of Classical Tibetan or Chinese into English, are now commonly used by scholars at all levels, from early-career students to senior researchers. This talk will provide an overview of the tools that the Dharmamitra project currently offers the Buddhist Studies community, with a focus on machine translation and cross-lingual search for philological use cases. It will also introduce the underlying technical architecture of these tools and discuss both the capabilities and limitations of the current generation of language models for philological applications.
Talk, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
I presented on Dharmamitra and DharmaNexus at National Taiwan University, introducing the platforms’ machine translation, semantic retrieval, and intertextuality discovery capabilities for Buddhist texts in Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan, and Chinese.
Presentation, ELTE BTK, Kodály terem, Budapest, Hungary
Traditional philological work on Buddhist sources often consists of laborious keyword searches across disparate corpora in multiple languages, followed by manual collation of parallels, a workflow that favours stamina over insight. Dharmamitra is an open-source platform that collapses those tasks to seconds using advanced computational and deep learning methods.
Conference proceedings talk, IABS Conference, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany
I presented as part of a panel with Marcus Bingenheimer at the IABS Conference, introducing the MITA toolkit and discussing how machine translation technology is enabling a paradigm shift in the philological study of Buddhist texts.
Presentation, Online workshop "Navigating Indra’s Net: Digital Approaches to Text Reuse-based Inter-textuality in Pre-Modern East Asian Texts" at the Hanmun Lab, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany (online)
This presentation is part of an online workshop on digital approaches to intertextuality in pre-modern East Asian texts. The talk will provide a preliminary investigation of different representation methods for semantic similarity tasks in Buddhist Chinese and related languages of the Buddhist tradition.
Presentation, DH International Workshop at Keio University, Tokyo, Japan, Tokyo, Japan
This presentation was part of a workshop at Keio University, co-organized by Kakenhi Special Promotion Research “Compilation of the Reiwa Daizokyo as a Digital Research Infrastructure - Presentation of a Research Infrastructure Construction Model for Next-Generation Humanities (JP25H00001)” and the Research Infrastructure Hub, Research and Development Project for the DX of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Workshop, Annual Conference of the Association of Asian Studies, Columbus, Ohio
With the advent of large language models, machine translation (MT) has become a widely used, but little understood, tool for research, language learning, and communication. GPT, Claude, and many other model series allow researchers now to access literature in different languages, and even translate primary texts composed in classical languages with few resources available. But how to evaluate the translation output of such machines? How to decide which model is the best for my own research purposes and how to tweak it? How will MT impact language learning, which is fundamental for Asian Studies?
Talk, CEAL (Council on East Asian Libraries) Technology Forum, Columbus, Ohio
Recent advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing have revolutionized information retrieval and question-answering systems. This talk introduces MITRASearch, a specialized search platform designed for exploring Buddhist literature preserved across Classical Asian languages including Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Pāli. The system leverages multilingual approximate search capabilities to enable scholars to identify parallel passages and conduct comparative analyses across different writing systems and translations. We demonstrate how large language models integrated into the Dharmamitra project enhance user interaction with search results, facilitating dynamic exploration of these classical texts. This innovation addresses the long-standing challenge of cross-linguistic textual research in Buddhist studies and offers new possibilities for digital humanities scholarship.
Talk, Ito International Research Center, Thanksgiving Hall, Tokyo, Japan
Part of the International Symposium “Buddhist Studies and Digital Humanities: 100 Years of the Taishō Tripiṭaka and 30 Years of SAT”
Talk, Workshop: Case studies from current research projects - Conversations on Digital Scholarly Editing, Śivadharma Project Headquarters, Palazzo Giusso, L'Orientale University of Naples, Naples, Italy
This talk was presented as part of the workshop “Case studies from current research projects - Conversations on Digital Scholarly Editing” organized by Martina Dello Buono and Florinda De Simini at L’Orientale University of Naples.
Talk, Online - via Zoom, Heidelberg, Germany
Talk, Johns Hopkins University, Center for Language and Speech Processing, Baltimore, MD, USA
Recent years saw the rise of multilingual language models that achieve high levels of performance for a large number of tasks, with some of them handling hundreds of languages at once. Premodern languages are usually underrepresented in such models, leading to poor performance in downstream applications. The Dharmamitra project aims to develop a diverse set of language models to address these shortcomings for the classical Asian low-resource languages Sanskrit, Tibetan, Classical Chinese, and Pali. These models provide solutions for low-level NLP tasks such as word segmentation and morpho-syntactic tagging, as well as high-level tasks including semantic search, machine translation, and general chatbot interaction. The talk will address the individual challenges and unique characteristics of the data involved, and the strategies deployed to address these. It will also demonstrate how these different tools can be combined in an application that goes beyond simple sentence-to-sentence machine translation, providing detailed grammatical explanations and corpus-wide search to support both early-stage language learners and experienced researchers with specific demands.
Talk, AI and the Future of Buddhist Studies Conference, Numata Center for Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
Talk, PNC 2024 Annual Conference and Joint Meetings, Seoul, Korea
Translation and search are among the fundamental problems when researching the textual source material of Buddhist traditions. MITRA has successfully developed machine translation models to ease the access to this material. When it comes to search, The Dharmamitra project approaches this problem by using semantic embeddings that enable search on related passages in different languages, regardless of whether the answer to the query is found in a text preserved in Pāli, Sanskrit, Tibetan, or Chinese. In addition to providing researchers with this powerful search system, Dharmamitra also provides a system for the automatic detection of similar text passages within the same language and across different languages. In my talk, I will demonstrate how these tools are designed and how researchers can access them and integrate them in their workflow.
Talk, National Taiwan University (NTU), Taipei, Taiwan
Talk, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Talk, International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Conference, Auroville, Puducherry, India (Online presentation)
Talk, Seoul, Korea, Seoul, South Korea
Talk, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Talk, Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Talk, Universität Hamburg, international symposium 'Perspectives of Digital Humanities in the Field of Buddhist Studies', Hamburg, Germany
Talk, Universität Hamburg, international symposium 'Perspectives of Digital Humanities in the Field of Buddhist Studies', Hamburg, Germany
Talk, Freie Universität Berlin, Deutscher Orientalistentag 2022, Berlin, Germany
Talk, The College of Humanities, University of Arizona, Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC), Arizona, USA
Talk, 16th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Prague, Czech Republic
Talk, Digital Orientalist Online Conference, Online
Talk, Universität Hamburg, Khyentse Center Lecture Series, Hamburg, Germany
Talk, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Workshop on Buddhism and Language, Munich, Germany
Talk, Tsukuba-Hamburg Young Scholars' Workshop, Tsukuba Global Science Week 2018, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
Talk, Cluster Professorship Buddhist Studies der Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany