AI@IPCH is directed by Damon Crockett, who led scientific research for the IPCH’s Lens Media Lab for most of its tenure, between 2018 and 2025. Dr. Crockett has spent the past decade applying computational methods to the study of culture. In 2015, he completed a Ph.D. in philosophy and cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and later went on to research positions at the Cultural Analytics Lab at UCSD; the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA; the Center for Data Science and Public Policy at the University of Chicago; and, prior to joining the Lens Media Lab, was a postdoctoral associate in computer science at Yale’s Digital Humanities Lab.
Dr. Crockett’s recent work in AI includes a comprehensive evaluation of the image captioning ability of vision-language models for historical photographs; a paper on language models and cultural heritage for the Workshop on Human-AI Interaction for Digital History and Cultural Heritage at the ACM Conference for Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2024); and a lecture for the UCLA/Getty Interdepartmental Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage on the epistemic and ethical suitability of large language models for cultural heritage research.