DharmaMitra Project Led by Assistant Professor Sebastian Nehrdich Wins the Aming Tu Prize
The research project "DharmaMitra," led by Assistant Professor Sebastian Nehrdich (Digital Archive Research Unit, CIJS), has been awarded the Aming Tu Prize, organized by the Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts (DILA) in Taiwan.
This international prize was established to commemorate the achievements of Professor Aming Tu, a pioneer in digital Buddhology, and is awarded to projects and researchers who have made significant contributions to building sustainable resources, new methodologies, and research environments for Buddhist studies. The Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts is a research institution that has played a leading role in building large-scale databases of Buddhist literature, and is widely recognized as a global hub for Buddhist studies and the digital humanities in East Asia.
▼ Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts Official Page:
https://amingtuprize.dila.edu.tw/#current-laureate
In this award, DharmaMitra was highly praised for its significant contributions to the advancement of digital Buddhology and the development of academic infrastructure by establishing an AI-driven research environment with high accuracy and reliability for handling primary Buddhist literature. In connection with this award, Assistant Professor Nehrdich has been invited to Taiwan to deliver the "2026 Aming Tu Prize Commemorative Lecture."
■ About the DharmaMitra Project
DharmaMitra is a joint project of the Tsadra Foundation, the Center for Integrated Japanese Studies (CIJS) at Tohoku University, and the Berkeley AI Research Lab (BAIR) at UC Berkeley. They launched it as a meta-platform equipped with cutting-edge machine translation, OCR technology, and information retrieval capabilities, designed to accelerate research on Buddhist literature written in various ancient Asian languages, including Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, and Classical Chinese. It is widely used by researchers worldwide as a tool to streamline the decoding and comparative study of classical Buddhist texts that require specialized expertise.
