The Faculty of Arts and Humanities (FAH) of the public University of Macau (UM) held its annual Macao Humanities Forum recently, featuring a lecture on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in humanities and healthcare research, according to a UM statement yesterday.
Liang Hualou, chair professor of neuroscience and AI at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), delivered a lecture titled “Transforming Humanities and Healthcare through Artificial Intelligence”, which was attended faculty members and students, the statement said.
In his welcome remarks, FAH assistant dean Joaquim Kuong Io-Kei said that advances in AI have provided new tools for research into language, literature, culture, history and the arts, the statement said, noting that researchers can use AI to analyse large cultural and linguistic corpora and identify patterns that may otherwise be difficult to observe, while considering interpretation and ethical issues.
During the lecture, Liang discussed AI applications in language neuroscience, education and communication. He introduced his team’s research using large language models (LLMs) to analyse transcribed speech and identify linguistic features associated with Alzheimer’s disease, the statement said.
The study analysed speech and text data from participants describing pictures, with machine learning models used to identify differences between healthy individuals and patients with Alzheimer’s disease, the statement noted, pointing out that the results showed that text embeddings generated by LLMs achieved better performance in detecting Alzheimer’s disease and predicting cognitive test scores than conventional acoustic feature-based methods.
Liang said his team is also studying newer models, different languages and data sources, as well as multimodal data and multi-agent collaboration, with the aim of assisting clinicians in making comprehensive assessments, the statement added.
During the Q&A session, attendees asked about LLM updates, AI-clinician collaboration and whether AI could distinguish different types of dementia and identify underlying mechanisms, the statement noted. Liang said his team is exploring the use of LLMs to classify dementia types and investigate related mechanisms, the statement added.
The lecture, which was held on September 16, was the first session of the Macao Humanities Forum for the 2026/2027 academic year, the statement said.
This handout photo provided by the University of Macau (UM) yesterday shows Liang Hualou, chair professor of neuroscience and AI at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), addressing the Macao Humanities Forum at the public university’s campus on September 16.
