Project members
Principal Investigator
Dirk Hovy is an Associate Professor of computer science in the Marketing Department of Bocconi, and the scientific director of the Data and Marketing Insights research unit of BIDSA. Previously, he was faculty at the University of Copenhagen, got a PhD from USC’s Information Sciences Institute, and a linguistics master’s in Germany.
Dirk is interested in the interaction between language, society, and machine learning, or what language can tell us about society, and what computers can tell us about language. He is also interested in ethical questions of bias and algorithmic fairness in machine learning.
He has authored over 70 articles on these topics, including 3 best paper awards, and a tetxbook on NLP in Python. Dirk has co-founded and organized several workshops (on computational social science, and ethics in NLP), and was a local organizer for the EMNLP 2017 conference.
Research Team
Amanda Cercas Curry is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Bocconi University. Her research interests mainly focus on Natural Language Processing, specifically on open-domain conversational systems, their social impact and how we can develop more ethical AI across disciplines. During her PhD, she worked on abuse detection and mitigation in dialogue systems particularly when it comes to female digital assitants. During her PhD, she led her university’s team in the 2018 Amazon Alexa Challenge during which they were finalists. She also co-hosts the podcast “Let’s Chat Ethics” which covers current issues in AI Ethics.
Anne Lauscher (she/her) is a postdoctoral researcher in the Natural Language Processing group at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, where she is working on introducing demographic factors into language processing systems with the aim of improving algorithmic performance and system fairness. She obtained her Ph.D., awarded with the highest honors (summa cum laude), from the Data and Web Science group at the University of Mannheim, Germany, where her research focused on the interplay between language representations and computational argumentation. During her studies, she also interned at and became an independent research contractor for Grammarly Inc. and for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. In 2021, she received the Maria Gräfin von Linden-Award in life sciences/ STEM, which honors outstanding female researchers in the German State of Baden-Württemberg for her research on Ethical Artificial Intelligence.
Debora Nozza (she/her) is an Assistant Professor at Bocconi University. She was recently awarded a €120,000 grant from Fondazione Cariplo for her project MONICA, which will focus on monitoring coverage, attitudes, and accessibility of Italian measures in response to COVID-19. Her research interests mainly focus on Natural Language Processing, specifically on the detection and counter-acting of hate speech and algorithmic bias on Social Media data in multilingual context.
She was one of the organizers of the task on Automatic Misogyny Identification (AMI) at Evalita 2018 and Evalita 2020, and one of the organizers of the HatEval Task 5 at SemEval 2019 on multilingual detection of hate speech against immigrants and women in Twitter.
