We are happy to announce the keynote speakers of the CHR2025 conference!

Miguel Escobar Varela is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore and deputy director of the Centre for Computational Social Science and Humanities (CSSH). He studies the changing landscape of Southeast Asian cultural heritage by combining fieldwork with computational methods (such as NLP, computer vision and network analysis). His aim is to understand how the production and reception of cultural forms have changed over time, in areas such as the performing arts, print media, and digital spaces. Besides academic publications, he develops public-facing projects, which include museum installations and digital platforms. He is the author of Theater as Data (University of Michigan Press, 2021).

Els Lefever is Associate Professor at the LT3 language and translation technology team at Ghent University, which conducts fundamental and applied research for NLP. She started her career as a computational linguist at the R&D-department of Lernout & Hauspie Speech products and holds a PhD in computer science from Ghent University on ParaSense: Parallel Corpora for Word Sense Disambiguation (2012). Els has a strong expertise in machine learning of natural language and multilingual natural language processing, with a special interest for computational semantics, language modeling of lower-resourced languages and multilingual terminology extraction. She currently supervises PhD research on complex reasoning in large language models, argumentation mining in social media, the automatic detection of irony in online text, multimodal emotion detection and generation, and NLP approaches for low(er)-resourced languages, such as cuneiform, Byzantine Greek, or historical travelogues. She teaches Terminology and Translation Technology, Language Technology, Localisation, Digital Text Analysis, Digital Humanities and feature-based machine learning courses.