Robert West

Robert West is an Associate Professor at EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences, leading the Data Science Lab (dlab). His research focuses on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Computational Social Science, analyzing human-generated data from the web, social media, and online platforms.

Education:

• PhD in Computer Science (2016) - Stanford University
• MSc in Computer Science (2010) - McGill University
• BSc in Computer Science (2007) - Technische Universität München

Research Interests:
West develops algorithms for analyzing large-scale web data, with emphasis on multilingual NLP, social network analysis, and AI ethics. His work bridges machine learning with social science to understand digital human behavior.

Scientific Awards:

• ICWSM’22 Adamic–Glance Distinguished Young Researcher Award
• Google Faculty Research Award
• Facebook Research Award
• Multiple Outstanding Paper Awards at ICWSM and WWW

Advising & Grants:
He advises 12 PhD students and has secured funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, Swiss Data Science Center, and industry partners. His lab maintains collaborations with Microsoft Research and CROSS.

Labs & Collaborations:
West leads the Data Science Lab at EPFL, which focuses on web-scale data analysis, privacy-preserving machine learning, and AI for social good. The lab develops tools like Wikispeedia and Quotebank for public data exploration.