Turing AI Fellow
Maria is a Professor in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at Queen Mary, University of London. She is in receipt of an EPSRC/UKRI Turing AI fellowship award on Creating Time Sensitive Sensors from Language & Heterogeneous User-Generated Content (2019-2025) https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/time-sensitive-sensing-language-and-user-generated-content .
At the Alan Turing Institute she co-leads the NLP and data science for mental health interest groups and supervises PhD students. She is co-leading projects on Language sensing for dementia monitoring & diagnosis (https://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/langsensing/), Opinion summarisation from social media, an AI evidence based framework during pandemics (https://panacea2020.github.io/index.html).
Maria has a DPhil from the University of Oxford on learning pragmatic knowledge from text. Her work has contributed to advances in knowledge discovery from corpora, automation of scientific experimentation and automatic extraction of information from the scientific literature. She has published widely both in NLP and interdisciplinary venues. Past awards include an IBM Faculty Award for work on emotion sensing from heterogeneous mobile phone data, being a co-investigator on the EU Project PHEME, which studied the spread of rumours in social media (2014-2017) and an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2010-2013) on reasoning with scientific articles.
- Co-founder, leader and organiser of the Data Science for Mental Health SIG at The Alan Turing Institute
- Co-founder, leader and organiser of the NLP SIG at The Alan Turing Institute
- Workshop co-chair of the PANACEA project workshop at The Alan Turing Institute, September 2022
- Workshop co-chair and shared task organiser of the 8th CLPsych workshop (the flagship workshop on NLP for mental health) at NAACL 2022. The workshop highlights and showcases one of the main focusses of the AI fellowship on longitudinal methods in Natural Language Processing and how capturing moments of change can be linked to phenomena such as suicidality.
- Workshop co-chair of the 2nd Workshop on Combating Online Hostile Posts in Regional Languages during Emergency Situations at ACL 2022.
- Workshop co-organiser of the 4th Mediate: Workshop on News Media and Computational Journalism at ICWSM 2023.
- Workshop co-organiser of the 3rd Mediate: Workshop on News Media and Computational Journalism at ICWSM 2022.
- Workshop co-organiser of the 2nd Mediate: Workshop on News Media and Computational Journalism at ICWSM 2021.