Dirk Hovy

Dirk Hovy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing Sciences at Bocconi University. He serves as Scientific Director of BIDSA’s Data and Marketing Insights (DMI) research unit and heads the MilaNLP lab. His work focuses on natural language processing (NLP) and computational social science, with a particular interest in ethics and fairness in AI, large language models, transfer learning, and computational methods for social science. He has organized major conferences such as EMNLP 2017 and workshops on abusive language detection and computational social science.

Education: PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC), Master’s in Sociolinguistics from Germany.

Research interests span NLP techniques like reinforcement learning and adversarial learning, alongside societal impacts of AI. His recent work explores sociodemographic variables in NLP models and their integration with demographic information. Notable contributions include geolocation via social media text, gender bias in NLP systems, and hate speech detection on Twitter.

Labs/Teams: Leads MilaNLP and directs BIDSA’s DMI unit.

Grants: Received a 2020 ERC Starting Grant to study sociodemographic variables and NLP models.