Digital Turcology and Cultural Heritage (DTCH) has been awarded USD 50,000 in funding under the Bridging the Future Grant programme, run by the NeurIPS Foundation, one of the most respected and important international institutions in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning research.
NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading academic meeting points for artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, generative AI, natural language processing, computer vision, statistics, optimisation, and related areas of engineering.
The Bridging the Future Grant was awarded to the methodological framework developed by DTCH’s founding director, Assoc. Prof. Dr Şermin Kalafat, to strengthen machine learning and natural language processing capacity for historical Turkic languages. This framework places the DTCH Codex initiative and the Digital Turcologist profile at its centre.
This support from the NeurIPS Foundation, situated at the centre of the global AI research ecosystem, marks an important step for the international recognition of Digital Turcology and Cultural Heritage research. It has brought the methodological approach developed at DTCH, the Codex initiative, and the Digital Turcologist profile into dialogue with one of the most important international research ecosystems in the AI/ML world.
The project is led by Assoc. Prof. Dr Şermin Kalafat. Dr Kaan Üçsu, Yusuf Kılıç, and Şeyma Nur Akkaş will serve as researchers on the project. The honorary adviser of the project is Prof. Dr Hatice Şirin, a member of the DTCH Scientific Board.