Maria Papadopoulou (University of Crete): “Expert-in-the-Loop AI: Insights from the TALOS Lab”

This lecture presents research undertaken at the TALOS Lab (University of Crete), a European-funded research center dedicated to exploring how Artificial Intelligence can support research in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. It demonstrates how digital tools and workflows, when designed, steered, and evaluated by domain experts, can enrich established scholarly practices. Through examples of semantic annotation, knowledge graph modelling, and natural language processing, the lecture shows how computational methods clarify the interrelation of concepts, persons, places, and events, make historical arguments and source relationships explicit and traceable, and enable the exploration of large corpora in ways that invite further close reading and philological analysis. At every stage, human expertise shapes the research questions, defines the analytical categories, guides model design, curates the data, interprets results, and validates outputs. Within TALOS, expert-guided AI is framed not as a rupture with disciplinary traditions, but as a methodological evolution within Classical scholarship. AI is embedded in collaborative research and teaching that cultivates essential 21^st century skills – data modeling, AI fluency, and teamwork – preparing the next generation of researchers and scholars.