The 27th Harvard East Asia Society (HEAS) Graduate Student Conference, held from February 16 to 17, is one of the world’s most prestigious academic forums for East Asian studies. PhD candidates from top-tier institutions—including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Tokyo, Peking University, and the University of London—gathered to share their latest research. During the event, Venerable You Heng of Fo Guang Shan presented the “Fo Guang AI Translator,” ushering in a new era for the translation of Buddhist scriptures.
Themed “Tying Knots: Enduring Legacies and Future Perspectives of East Asia,” the conference featured keynote speeches by Dr. James Robson and Dr. Karen Thornber. The forum was divided into eleven sessions, led by prominent scholars such as Dr. David Wang, Dr. Eugene Wang, Dr. Charles Hallisey, and Dr. Deborah Klimburg-Salter, covering religion, politics, art, history, and film.
Venerable You Heng, Superintendent of Fo Guang Shan Chicago and a PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence Engineering, delivered a presentation titled “Neural Machine Translation on Voluminous Buddhist Scriptures.” She introduced the “Fo Guang AI Translator,” custom-developed for Buddhist texts using state-of-the-art Transformer technology. As an experienced Chinese-English translator, Venerable You Heng discussed the limitations of human translation and emphasized the professionalism and efficiency of AI in translating vast volumes of scriptures.
The Fo Guang AI Translator demonstrates exceptional performance. Compared to general-purpose engines like Google, DeepL, and ChatGPT, it provides superior translation quality for Buddhist classics and ancient verses, meeting the highest standards of accuracy. A significant technical breakthrough lies in its efficiency: it does not require supercomputers for computation but instead uses small, high-quality datasets to trigger learning and updates in neural machine translation. Currently, it can translate 80,000 words every four minutes. Its advantage stems from using parallel Chinese-English data from Fo Guang Shan publications, ensuring high quality and rapid processing.
The conference also focused on the historical and contemporary realities of East Asian culture. Keynote speaker Dr. James Robson highlighted the crucial role of Buddhism in Asian development and the Maritime Silk Road. Other doctoral presentations included Jusung Lee (Yale) on modern Korean Buddhism, Xiao Liu on Dunhuang silk banners, and Hongmin Ahn (Harvard) on post-colonial monastic marriage in Korea. This academic gathering not only facilitated international collaboration but also provided new insights into the future of East Asian studies through the lens of modern technology.