Bio
Alexandre Gefen, “directeur de recherche” (research professor) at the CNRS, is a historian of ideas and literature. He is the author of numerous articles and essays on contemporary culture and literature and literary theory. He was one of the pioneers of Digital Humanities in France. He discovered the uses of AI for research (word vectors, topic modelling) at the Stanford Literary Lab as part of the project "For an empirical history of literature", Transatlantic program for collaborative work in the field of digital humanities, which he co-directed with Franco Moretti (FMSH Paris-Fellon Foundation). More recently, he has studied the fictional representations of AI ("Posthumanist Solidarity. The political and ethical imaginations of artificial intelligence", Open philosophy, in press). Deputy Scientific Director of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences of the CNRS since 2017, in charge of interdisciplinarity, he leads the priorities "Digital Humanities" and "Artificial Intelligence". In particular, he represented the SHS in the Global Forum on AI for Humanity organized in 2019 and coordinated with Jérôme Lang the CNRS MITI funding call "Scientific and social issues of artificial intelligence" (2020).