Kurt Keutzer received his PhD in Computer Science with a minor in Tibetan Studies from Indiana University in 1984. Over his career his research has focused on developing novel efficient algorithms for key computational problems in computer science, most recently machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. In the process he has published over 300 refereed articles, co-authored six books, and won several Best Paper awards.
Kurt has continued his interest and research in Tibetan studies over the last 40 years and has occasionally published on his discoveries. More impactfully, he merged his interests in computer science and Tibetan studies to co-develop the Namsel Optical Character Recognition system for Tibetan that enabled electronic search of thousands of Tibetan texts. Most recently, he co-developed the AI-based Monlam-MITRA Tibetan-English machine translation system. This system is broadly available at monlam.ai and available for translation/research teams at dharmamitra.org. It is currently serving 20,000 translation requests per day.
Kurt is a Life Fellow of the IEEE and served on the Board of Directors of the Buddhist Digital Resource Center from 2013-2019.
Most pertinently, Kurt is excited to explore how new generations of Large Language Model technologies can facilitate scholarship on Buddhism and other wisdom traditions through machine translation, multilingual semantic search, and intelligent access to secondary literature.
