Aalborg University (AAU) is a Danish public research university founded in 1974, with campuses in Aalborg, Copenhagen, and Esbjerg. The university enrolls approximately 17,700 students and employs more than 3,700 staff across faculties spanning engineering, life sciences, social sciences and humanities, medicine, and IT design. AAU is known internationally for its problem-based learning (PBL) model, in which students and researchers work through real-world problems collaboratively rather than in isolated disciplinary tracks.
The university’s interdisciplinary orientation has produced research groups that cross traditional boundaries between the humanities, social sciences, and engineering. Among them is the Techno-Anthropology Lab (TANTLab), a research group housed in the Department of Culture and Learning at AAU’s Copenhagen campus. TANTLab was shaped by the work of Torben Elgaard Jensen, Anders Kristian Munk, and Anders Koed Madsen, who helped pioneer Techno-Anthropology as a research program combining ethnographic fieldwork with computational methods.
Matt Artz is pursuing a PhD in Computational Anthropology at AAU through TANTLab, with a dissertation on AI Anthropology at the intersection of culture and computation. Jensen serves as his PhD advisor. The lab’s tradition of iterating between ethnographic and computational approaches, and AAU’s broader commitment to problem-based, interdisciplinary research, made it a natural fit for a dissertation that treats culture and computation as inseparable.