Maria Liakata

Maria Liakata is a Professor of Natural Language Processing at Queen Mary University of London, where she serves as Deputy Centre Lead and 'Health and Wellbeing' Theme Lead for the Centre for Human-Centred Computing within the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. She leads multiple research initiatives focusing on applying NLP techniques to healthcare applications, particularly mental health monitoring through social media and longitudinal user-generated content analysis.

Her research interests span Natural Language Processing, Semantics and Discourse, Social Media analysis, Machine Learning, BioNLP, and NLP for Mental Health. Dr. Liakata has made significant contributions to knowledge discovery from corpora, automation of scientific experimentation, and automatic extraction of information from scientific literature. Her work has practical applications in mental health monitoring, dementia diagnosis, and rumor verification systems.

Her recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on longitudinal analysis of language for mental health applications, temporal modeling of user-generated content, and healthcare AI. She has developed novel techniques for detecting changes in user representations over time, which have applications in mental health monitoring and early dementia diagnosis. Her research bridges the gap between technical NLP advancements and real-world healthcare challenges.

• EPSRC/UKRI Turing AI fellowship award on Creating Time Sensitive Sensors from Language & Heterogeneous User-Generated Content (2019-2025)
• IBM Faculty Award for work on emotion sensing from heterogeneous mobile phone data
• EU Project PHEME co-investigator (2014-2017) studying the spread of rumours in social media
• Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2010-2013) on reasoning with scientific articles

Dr. Liakata supervises a diverse group of PhD students working on cutting-edge NLP applications for healthcare, including mental health monitoring, dementia diagnosis, and medical imaging analysis. She leads multiple substantial research grants totaling millions of pounds from EPSRC, MRC, Wellcome Trust, and industry partners. Her current projects include 'Addressing socio-technical limitations of LLMs for medical and social computing' and 'Social media, Smartphone use and Self harm in Young People (3S-YP study)'.

She leads the 'Health and Wellbeing' research theme within the Centre for Human-Centred Computing and collaborates closely with the Centre for Multimodal AI. Her interdisciplinary research team combines expertise in NLP, machine learning, clinical psychology, and healthcare informatics to develop practical AI solutions for real-world health challenges.