From Gilgamesh to ChatGPT: Challenges and opportunities to understand human personality and values through computational text analysis.

When: 1:00-2:00pm Friday, 05 April 2023

Where: RHMZ02 or  https://vuw.zoom.us/j/94203755754?pwd=aDFJZXpOSmFZOWczRDhCUVVybXNvUT09

In this talk I will give an overview to a line of our work at the Complexity and Connection Science Lab where we seek to use computational approaches to understand nuanced psychological constructs like human personality and values. We are specifically interested how these constructs vary and change over different scales of time and space. I will present results of a number of studies we have done (or are currently doing) on textual artifacts as diverse as the Gilgamesh epic, the books of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, autobiographical memories written by humans living in the present, and the AI-supported ChatGPT dialogue agent.

Markus Luczak-Roesch is an Associate Professor within the School of Information Management (SIM) at Victoria University of Wellington and a Principal Investigator at Te Pūnaha Matatini—New Zealand's centre for research excellence (CoRE) on complex systems. He obtained his MSc (2008) and PhD (2014) degrees from the Free University of Berlin (Germany) where he also worked as a Lecturer in Computer Science from 2010 to 2013. From 2013 until 2016 he then worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton (UK) on the prestigious EPSRC programme grant "SOCIAM - The Theory and Practice of Social Machines" (https://sociam.org/), which involved the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh and Southampton in an endeavor to understand what the inventor of the World Wide Web (and co-investigator on the SOCIAM project) Sir Tim Berners-Lee described in his book Weaving the Web as follows: "Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social constraint – the very processes from which society arises. Computers can help if we use them to create abstract social machines on the Web: processes in which people do the creative work and the machine does the administration." Markus' research programme is highly inter- and transdisciplinary with a strong focus on mathematical modelling and computational analysis of evolving complex systems. The methods he develops and applies allow completely new and unique perspectives to fundamental phenomena in specialised disciplines such as psychology, sociology, humanities and climate science. Markus pioneered the theoretical foundations of Transcendental Information Cascades (TICs), a novel method to transform information sequences into temporal networks of information token recurrences. His research already contributed substantially to the understanding of psychological constructs like personality and values, the science-policy interface, collective human activities in online communities such as Wikipedia and Wikidata, citizen scientists’ sense making on platforms such as Zooniverse and EyeWire, and information flows through literary texts. Around his research programme he established the Complexity & Connection Science Lab that brings together students and researchers to work on theories and methods to understand the structures and dynamics of complex systems, and to develop computational tools that securely and meaningfully augment human intelligence.

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