NEW YORK (Dec. 17, 2025) — Schmidt Sciences has awarded $11 million for up to 23 teams of researchers around the world to develop and apply artificial intelligence to archaeology, history, literature and other humanities disciplines, seeking to unlock new understandings of human history and culture, the organization announced today.
Three University of Kentucky faculty members are among the awarded teams. The projects and UK researchers include:
“When we think about AI and the current models we’re all familiar with, like ChatGPT, ancient languages and manuscripts usually fall in the category of ‘low resource,’” Brusuelas said. “Those models definitely know a lot about them. But they’ve never been trained in a way that can truly make them collaborative research partners. Can they help isolate meaningful patterns of damage in fragmented manuscripts? Can they help reconstruct letters based on the remaining ink traces or go through a stack of spectral images to optimize legibility? Not so much. Our project remedies issues like these. We want the humans studying the materiality of ancient manuscripts and editing their texts to have reliable AI partners.
“This project further reinforces that UK is an internationally recognized institution in the domain of AI and cultural heritage.”
See the full list of winners here.
“Our newest technologies may shed light on our oldest truths, on all that makes us human — from the origins of civilization to the peaks of philosophical thought to contemporary art and film,” said Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Sciences. “Schmidt Sciences’ Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) is poised to change not only the course of scholarship, but also the way we see ourselves and our role in the world.”
Humanities scholars have a hard time using AI models because those models are trained on massive amounts of contemporary data, modern languages and two-dimensional media, whereas humanities research often involves ancient or lesser-spoken languages, three-dimensional artifacts, art made from a variety of materials and relatively small amounts of ambiguous and culture-specific information. The Schmidt Sciences’s HAVI program will support researchers to create new AI models or evolve existing ones to open new avenues for historical understanding and inquiry.
Researchers will, for example, create AI models that can answer questions from the perspective of a particular historical place and time, analyze how camera movement and soundtracks shape narrative in film, explore how changes in trade routes or technology affect art and literature, search for new, buried archaeological sites and even virtually unwind ancient scrolls or read illegible, torn, shorthand manuscripts. Their work will range across geographies and millennia, from industrial England to Qing-era China to ancient Egypt.
“Rather than destroying the humanities, as many have feared, AI has a role in advancing the humanities, opening new avenues of scholarship,” said Brent Seales, Ph.D., professor of computer science in the UK Pigman College of Engineering, who leads HAVI. “Computational methods have been a part of the study of humanities for decades, and it’s time to explore how to integrate AI into this essential scholarship.”
The teams were selected after multiple rounds of review by Schmidt Sciences and external experts. They join two inaugural awards from HAVI granted earlier this year — one to the Sorbonne University in Paris to study the artworks of Eugene Delacroix and a second to the University of Kentucky’s EduceLab, a first-of-its-kind, next-gen heritage science user facility that applies AI, micro-CT imaging and other high-tech instrumentation to the study of cultural heritage artifacts.
Schmidt Sciences is also announcing the next round of this program, with an application due date of March 13, 2026.
About Schmidt Sciences
Schmidt Sciences is a nonprofit organization founded in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that works to accelerate scientific knowledge and breakthroughs with the most promising, advanced tools to support a thriving planet. The organization prioritizes research in areas poised for impact including AI and advanced computing, astrophysics, biosciences, climate and space — as well as supporting researchers in a variety of disciplines through its science systems program.
As the state’s flagship, land-grant institution, the University of Kentucky exists to advance the Commonwealth. We do that by preparing the next generation of leaders — placing students at the heart of everything we do — and transforming the lives of Kentuckians through education, research and creative work, service and health care. We pride ourselves on being a catalyst for breakthroughs and a force for healing, a place where ingenuity unfolds. It's all made possible by our people — visionaries, disruptors and pioneers — who make up 200 academic programs, a $476.5 million research and development enterprise and a world-class medical center, all on one campus.
