Congratulations to Dr. Muhammad Abdul-Mageed for being named a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning in the 2022 round of CRC appointments!
Dr. Abdul-Mageed is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Department of Linguistics and an Associate Member in Computer Science at UBC. He is also a member of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Decision making and Action (CAIDA) and the Institute for Computing, Information, and Cognitive Systems and Director of the Deep Learning & Natural Language Processing (DLNLP) Group at UBC.
His research focuses on Natural Language Processing, a field aiming at teaching machines to understand and generate human language. From the Machine Learning side, Dr. Abdul-Mageed is particularly working on Deep Learning, a class of machine learning methods inspired by information processing in the brain. In particular, his research focuses on deep representation learning and natural language socio-pragmatics with a goal to innovate more equitable, efficient, and 'social' machines for improved human health, safer social networking, and reduced information overload.
In March 2022, Dr. Abdul-Mageed and his team at the DLNLP Group launched Learnera.ai, a new educational platform that offers free Deep Learning training. The main goal of the platform is to support individuals with basic or no prior knowledge of machine learning.
"One of the most important goals that I am very passionate about is to democratize science and technology in general by availing diverse opportunities for our students to get the relevant training they are looking for. This means teaching new courses and offering workshops that involve novel technologies, and working with students on research projects inside my own research groups but also by collaborating with other colleagues in the different institutions inside and outside of UBC." - Dr. Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Dr. Abdul-Mageed believes that the Canada Research Chair will allow him the flexibility and capacity to continue providing this training and research opportunities at a larger scale and serve not only the University but also Canada and the scientific community in general. Dr. Abdul-Mageed currently has a wide network of partnerships and collaborations with the industry and academia. For example, his research is currently supported by Google and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), and he has active collaborations with Microsoft Research.
The Language Sciences Institute extends its congratulations to Dr. Abdul-Mageed for this distinguished appointment!