Seminar: The Computational Wealth of Linguistic Diversity
- Date: Apr 28, 2026
- Time: 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Damian Blasi
- Location: Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin
- Room: Room 316 (CHM)
- Host: Center for Humans and Machines
- Topic: Discussion and debate formats, lectures
The more than 7,500 languages spoken today differ across many relevant dimensions: the meanings they encode, the social rules governing their use in interaction, and the patterns required to construct intelligible messages. In AI research, this diversity has largely been framed as a challenge—an obstacle to building systems capable of serving the full range of human linguistic communities.
Yet linguistic diversity also represents something else: a vast repository of computational solutions produced through thousands of generations of cultural evolution. Different languages require speakers to track and encode different kinds of information—such as evidential sources, spatial reference frames, numerical structure, or social relationships—thereby emphasizing distinct patterns of representation and inference.
In this presentation, I explore the idea that linguistic diversity constitutes a largely untapped computational resource for AI. I discuss how the computations required or emphasized across languages can lead to measurable differences in downstream reasoning tasks in both humans and large language models. Finally, I consider what the observable limits of linguistic diversity may reveal about the broader design space of possible reasoning systems.
Damian Blasi is an ICREA Research Professor based at the Center for Brain & Cognition at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona (Spain), a Schmidt Sciences Polymath, National Geographic Explorer, and a Branco Weiss Fellow. In addition, he is also an external researcher at the Human Relations Area Files (Yale University, USA) and an associate of the Culture, Cognition, Coevolution Lab based at the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and he serves as an ad hoc expert on linguistic diversity for UNESCO. Damian has been a recipient of the Rising Star Award from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science, and the Glushko Prize in Cognitive Sciences among other honors.
Damian Blasi is an ICREA Research Professor based at the Center for Brain & Cognition at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona (Spain), a Schmidt Sciences Polymath, National Geographic Explorer, and a Branco Weiss Fellow. In addition, he is also an external researcher at the Human Relations Area Files (Yale University, USA) and an associate of the Culture, Cognition, Coevolution Lab based at the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and he serves as an ad hoc expert on linguistic diversity for UNESCO. Damian has been a recipient of the Rising Star Award from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science, and the Glushko Prize in Cognitive Sciences among other honors.
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