Anton Berg

Anton Berg is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, affiliated with the Department of Digital Humanities within the Faculty of Arts and the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH). He is also a member of the methodological unit at HSSH, focusing on interdisciplinary research at the intersection of cognitive science, religious studies, and artificial intelligence.

His educational background spans computer science, cognitive science, and religious studies, enabling him to bridge technical and humanistic approaches to AI. His research primarily investigates how commercial image recognition systems interpret and categorize religious content, exploring issues of bias, representation, and the datafication of religion.

Berg's research interests include computer vision systems, automatic image recognition, machine and deep learning, large language models, and the relationship between religions, worldviews, and values related to AI technologies. He particularly focuses on inequality issues, the datafication of religion, the datafication of societies, the social scientific study of religion, and the cognitive science of religion. His work combines technical analysis of AI systems with social scientific perspectives on religion and technology.

His recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on examining biases in commercial image recognition services, particularly regarding religious content, with significant contributions to understanding representational silence and racial biases in these systems. He has also conducted important work on pandemic psychology, contributing to large-scale international studies on COVID-19 responses across 69 countries.

Berg has been actively involved in numerous academic activities, including presentations at international conferences on topics such as computer vision in religious studies, mediatized religious populism, and biases in image recognition services. His research has been presented at venues including the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion.

His teaching areas include religious studies, cognitive science, data science, and religion and technologies, reflecting his interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between digital technologies and religious phenomena.