Online lecture by Mathieu Jacomy, PhD in techno-anthropology and assistant professor at Aalborg University in Denmark, and Anders Kristian Munk, professor of computational anthropology and director of the Observatory for Human-Centred Engineering (ECHOlab) at the Technical University of Denmark, researchers in residence for one month at the Paris IAS as part of the "Distinguished Fellowship" programme developed in collaboration withPostGenAI@Paris.

PostGenAI@Paris: Based in the heart of Paris, this interdisciplinary and cross-sector consortium aims to develop ethical, inclusive and sovereign AI that is fully anchored in the major challenges of our time.

The Paris IAS Ideas online lecture series offers short and stimulating presentations by researchers from the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, marking the start of their month-long writing residency.

Session exclusively online and in English.
Free upon registration.
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Presentation

Mathieu Jacomy and Anders Kristian Munk's research project aims to develop AI-augmented qualitative research methods capable of analysing large-scale social phenomena in real time while maintaining interpretative depth.

The focus is on ‘observatory’ mapping of controversies, which involves continuously tracking the evolution of socio-technical controversies using large language models (LLMs) and advanced visualisation techniques.

The research project at the IEA in Paris via the PostGenAI cluster aims to create tools for computational social sciences, in particular ‘atlas systems’ that visualise large unstructured data sets using integration models and LLMs. The main challenges are to adapt LLMs to rigorous social research, to manage the limitations of AI such as hallucinations, and to develop specialised prompting skills for sociological analysis.

This addresses the bottleneck of traditional qualitative methods, which produce information too late to impact rapidly changing socio-technical landscapes, and promotes democratic engagement in emerging controversies when public input is most needed.