Research Critical AI Engineering, Digital Humanities and Educational Transfer
CAEDHET is an interdisciplinary, cross-university working group that undertakes projects in the field of generative artificial intelligence and discusses related issues. Its focus is on critical engineering: technical work closely linked to critical and ethical reflection.
Structure and Objectives
As part of CAEDHET, researchers from Heidelberg University of Education and Heidelberg University collaborate with one another, organised by the Heidelberg Centre for Digital Humanities and the Heidelberg School of Education. The working group serves not only as a forum for exchange, but also for networking and mutual support.
To this end, HCDH and HSE provide the necessary infrastructure (premises, etc.) as well as access to their networks and contacts.
However, CAEDHET sees itself not only as an interface between the two universities, but also as an interface between four often quite distinct disciplinary perspectives: AI Engineering, Digital Humanities, Educational Transfer and critical-ethical reflection. All of the working group’s projects focus on these four perspectives, albeit to varying degrees:
- AI Engineering: By this we mean the experimental approach to LLM architectures, i.e. primarily the perspective of interpretability research and explainable AI (xAI).
- Digital Humanities: In this context, we use this umbrella term to refer to computer-assisted analytical methods in the humanities; at the interface with AI, this means corpus-linguistic analysis methods and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
- Educational Transfer: A fundamental challenge in the academic study and societal integration of AI as a new technology lies in the transmission of rapidly changing bodies of knowledge. Only through tailored didactic and pedagogical strategies can minimum standards of AI literacy or AI competence be brought within reach. Teacher training students, in particular, play a central role here as multipliers. CAEDHET’s work therefore focuses on teacher training.
- Critical Ethical Reflection: We wish to expand the existing broader societal discourse on the subject of AI to include a specific perspective: CAEDHET focuses primarily on the latent interconnections between technical decisions, their affordances and the resulting ethical issues.
The associate members of CAEDHET are the members of the HCDH Executive Board. Further affiliations and participation in the working group are possible.
Dr. Florian Nieser
Dr Florian Nieser studied German Language and Literature and Theology at the University of Tübingen, where he also undertook further study in the field of ‘Digital Humanities’. He completed his doctoral thesis on the semiotics of heroism in Middle High German and Old French texts, also at Tübingen; in 2023, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Freiburg, focusing on the theme of heroism.
Since 2022, he has been Managing Director of the Heidelberg Centre for Digital Humanities, where he previously served as founder and academic coordinator of the Digital Humanities Forum from 2020 onwards. At the HCDH, his work focuses, amongst other things, on transmediality and digital humanities (computational text analysis and LLM-based research areas).
At CAEDHET, he is the research coordinator of the project group.
Dr. Thomas Renkert
Dr Thomas Renkert completed his degree in Protestant Theology at the University of Heidelberg, where he also obtained his PhD in Systematic Theology. Until 2022, he was a research fellow at the Institute for Diaconal Studies. He is one of the founders and co-editors of *Cursor_ – Journal of Explorative Theology*.
From 2022 to 2024, he served as research coordinator for the Heidelberg School of Education’s research and transfer clusters in the field of teacher training. Since 2024, he has been a research assistant to the HSE’s Executive Board. In this role, he focuses, amongst other things, on the topic of “AI literacy and educational equity”.
Alongside the fine-tuning of large language models and their interpretation, this is also his main area of research at CAEDHET.
Jonathan Gaede
Jonathan Gaede studied German Studies and Digital Humanities at JMU Würzburg and, as a research assistant, supports the HCDH in designing and running workshops on DH topics and in communicating with the research community. His interdisciplinary doctoral research project examines the role of astrological-alchemical secret symbols and ‘special characters’ in early modern scholarly literature.
As part of the CAEDHET project, he is interested in AI in the public sphere and its recognisability.
Dr. Maria Becker
Maria Becker is a research assistant in German Linguistics and at the Institute for Translation and Interpreting at the University of Heidelberg. She holds a Master’s degree in Linguistics, Philosophy and Psychology, as well as a PhD in Computational Linguistics. Her research focuses on the application of machine learning methods in the Digital Humanities, which is also a key focus of her work on the CAEDHET project. Maria’s broader research interests include computational social science, explainable AI, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, annotation studies and science communication.
Mayumi Ohta
Mayumi Ohta completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computational Linguistics at the University of Heidelberg. Her Master’s thesis received an honour and a special mention in the Best Paper Award at the 6th International Conference on Machine Learning, Optimisation and Data Science (LOD). After graduating, she gained professional experience as an expert in machine learning in both industry and academia in the field of natural language processing. Her current research interests lie in language modelling, with a particular focus on explainability.
Since October 2024, she has been a research assistant at the SFB 1671 ‘Home(s): Phenomena, Practices, Representations’ and works on IT administration and AI applications.
Jonas Braun
Jonas Braun completed his Bachelor of Science in Business Informatics at the University of Mannheim in 2015 and his Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam in 2019. He worked as an AI/Data Science Consultant from 2019 to 2024. He is currently employed as a research assistant on the MINT-ProNeD project (Heidelberg/HSE sub-project) and is part of CAEDHET.
For the Chair of Computer Science Education under Prof. Claudia Hildebrandt, he develops teacher training programmes and web apps on the topics of data literacy and artificial intelligence. The aim is to provide teachers and pupils with a basic understanding of data science through a data-driven approach, using associated interactive visualisations and locally running machine learning algorithms. His main areas of focus are educational transfer and AI engineering.
Dr. Nicole Flindt
Dr Nicole Flindt, M.A., is Head of the Graduate School and Managing Director of the Research Division within the Vice-Rectorate for Research, Digitalisation and Sustainability at Heidelberg University of Education. She studied education and law at the Universities of Mannheim and Heidelberg and completed her PhD on e-learning at Heidelberg University in collaboration with the software company SAS GmbH. In addition to her research in the fields of e-learning and artificial intelligence (AI) for schools and higher education institutions, neurodidactics, mental health and higher education research, she is project lead for the EU project ‘Young Refugees AI Student Empowerment Programme’ (RAISE), which aims to develop AI for brain-friendly e-learning portals.
At CAEDHET, she contributes her experience in the humanities and in pedagogy and didactics within the field of Digital Humanities, whilst her legal background also plays a role in the areas of ethical reflection and AI engineering.
Frederick Riemenschneider
Frederick Riemenschneider holds a Master’s degree in Computational Linguistics and, alongside his current Master’s degree in Classical Greek (75%) / Assyriology (25%), is a PhD student in Computational Linguistics at the University of Heidelberg. His PhD research focuses on ‘Mechanistic Interpretability in Multilingual Language Models’, whilst his interests centre on ancient languages, particularly Ancient Greek.
At CAEDHET, he works on AI engineering and the digital humanities.
