Dr Walid Magdy

Walid Magdy

Former position

Turing Fellow

Partner Institution

Bio

Walid Magdy is a lecturer at the School of Informatics, the University of Edinburgh (UoE), where he leads the social media analysis group. His main research interests include computational social science, data mining, and Arabic natural language processing. He holds his PhD from the School of Computing at Dublin City University (DCU), Ireland. He has an extensive industrial background from working earlier for IBM, Microsoft, and QCRI.

Research interests

Walid has two main lines of research: 1) Computational social science, where he applies quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to study online users' behaviour. This includes social media analysis for political events, online racism, e-health, and privacy. 2) NLP for social data science, where he develops the required technology for analysing big social data, including sentiment analysis, stance detection, and demographic prediction, with additional focus on English and Arabic languages. Through The Alan Turing Institute, Walid is contributing to the research priority on technology and health & wellbeing through understanding human behaviour. He is currently working with the Turing defence & security programme on building better technologies for better analysis for social media.