International Invited Speakers

Jen Jou (aka “Joey”) HUNG 洪振洲 was born in Taiwan in 1976. He earned his Ph.D. in Information Management from National Taiwan University of Science and Technology in 2006. He is currently a full-time professor in the Department of Buddhist Studies at Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts, where he also serves as the Director of the Library and Information Center. Additionally, he holds the position of Executive Director of the CBETA Foundation. Dr. Hung actively participates in various digital archiving projects led by Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts. His research interests include analysis of translators of Chinese Buddhist texts, construction of digital archiving projects, development of digital humanities research resources, and the application of AI in Buddhist studies.  

Jann Ronis brings to BDRC a strong background in Buddhology, pedagogy, and the digital humanities. He received MA and PhD degrees from the University of Virginia, where he researched the history of the Tibetan kingdom of Dergé in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and particularly the local Nyingma monasteries. In recent years, his research interests have expanded into the fields of literary analysis and contemporary Tibetan culture. Jann is fluent in both classical and spoken Tibetan, including both the Central and Kham dialects, and is highly proficient in Mandarin Chinese. 

Bruno Lainé studied Tibetan and Buddhist studies at the University of Vienna (Austria). In 2003 he joined the team of the Tibetan Manuscript Project Vienna (tmpv.univie.ac.at/), a long-term research initiative dedicated to the documentation, preservation, dissemination, and investigation of Tibetan canonical manuscript culture. Bruno develops the rKTs database (rkts.org) which is dedicated to making research on Tibetan Buddhist canonical collections openly accessible. The website provides comprehensive tools for studying canonical literature in more than 100 Kangyurs, Tangyurs, Tantra collections, and other collections of canonical literature.

I am a researcher with a background in technology and Buddhist studies from Thailand, Japan, and the US. For nearly 15 years, I have been working in the Dhammachai Tipiṭaka project, overseeing every process from manuscript digitization to digital platform development and critical edition preparation. Currently, we are finding a way to leverage the power of AI and digital humanities to efficiently analyze vast amounts of Pali variant readings from four major traditions of palm-leaf manuscripts. This approach will significantly streamline the process of transcribing manuscripts, collating variants, editing texts, and creating critical apparatus, ultimately leading to a more accurate and comprehensive critical edition of the Pali Canon.

Sebastian Nehrdich is a researcher at the Berkeley AI Research Lab (BAIR), UC Berkeley, and a PhD student in computational linguistics at the University of Duesseldorf under the guidance of Oliver Hellwig and Kurt Keutzer. He holds degrees in Indology and Sinology (BA, 2017) and Buddhist Studies (MA, 2020) from the University of Hamburg. Since 2023, he serves as CTO of the MITRA project at BAIR, developing machine translation models and search systems for Classical Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Pāli. His research combines machine learning and NLP with Buddhist studies, focusing on low-resource Asian languages and the development of tools for analyzing classical Buddhist texts. From 2018-2023 he served as the chief programmer of BuddhaNexus, a database which enables the exploration of textual reuse within Buddhist text collections.

Marcus Bingenheimer 馬德偉 is Associate Professor of Religion at Temple University. He taught Buddhist Studies and Digital Humanities for six years in Taiwan, and held visiting positions at universities in Korea, Japan, France, Thailand, and Singapore. Since 2001, he has supervised numerous projects concerning the digitization of Buddhist culture. His main research interests are Buddhist history and historiography, early sūtra literature, and how to apply computational approaches to research in the Humanities. He has written and edited a handful of books and some sixty-five peer-reviewed articles.

Currently, he is working on the Longshu jingtuwen 龍舒淨土文, a 12th century Buddhist text and trying to better understand and evaluate the machine translation of Buddhist text.

Michael Radich formerly taught at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and is now Professor of Buddhist Studies at Heidelberg University. His Harvard Ph.D. (2007) was entitled “The Somatics of Liberation”. He is author of How Ajātaśatru Was Reformed (2011), and The Mahāparinirvāṇa-mahāsūtra and the Emergence of Tathāgatagarbha Doctrine (2015). He was a Humboldt Fellow in Hamburg (2015), Shinnyo-en Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies at Stanford (2019), and Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at Tokyo University (2023–2024). He directs the long-term project “Stone Sūtras in China” (2005 2028), established by Lothar Ledderose and funded by the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. As of 2024, he is an elected member of the Heidelberger Akademie.

Orna Almogi is a Tibetologist working at the University of Hamburg. Her research interests extend to a number of areas connected with the Tibetan religio-philosophical traditions and Tibetan Buddhist literature, particularly that of the rNying-ma school, on which she published extensively. She has also been involved in several Digital Humanities projects, including the “Indo-Tibetan Lexical Resource” (ITLR), “Scholars and Scribes,” and BuddhaNexus. Currently she is the corresponding PI of the ERC Synergy project “Intellexus. Geology of Texts, Genealogy of Concepts, Intellectual Ecosystems: Mapping the Indic and Tibetic Buddhist Text Corpora.“ 

Dorji Wangchuk is a professor for Tibetology at the Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies, Asien-Afrika-Institut, Faculty of Humanities, Universität Hamburg. His main teaching and research interests lie in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist texts and ideas, Tibetan Buddhist intellectual history and history of ideas, and Tibetan Buddhist intellectual/literary/textual culture. He is one of the initiators, together with Dr. Orna Almogi and Sebastian Nehrdich, of the BuddhaNexus project and is currently is one of the PIs of the ERC Synergy Project “Intellexus.”