Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

Prior to joining MBZUAI, Professor Abdul-Mageed held multiple positions including a research scientist at an undisclosed startup, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania (2016-2018), a visiting assistant professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University (2015-2016), and a visiting scholar at Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University (2010-2012). His research has been funded by Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD), Amazon, Google, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Canadian Foundation for Innovation. Abdul-Mageed has three US patents. Professor Abdul-Mageed maintains an associate professor and a Canada research chair in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he is a founding member of UBC's Center for Artificial Intelligence.

Professor Abdul-Mageed’s research program focuses on deep representation learning and natural language socio-pragmatics, with a goal to innovate more equitable, efficient, and `social’ machines for improved human health, safer social networking, and reduced information overload. He also has a special focus on Arabic NLP. Applications of Professor Abdul-Mageed's work currently span a wide range of speech and language understanding and generation tasks. For example, his group works on language models, automatic speech processing, machine translation, and computational socio-pragmatics in social media.

• Double Ph.D. in computational linguistics and information science from Indiana University Bloomington, USA
• Master’s in computational linguistics from Indiana University Bloomington, USA

Abdul-Mageed and his group have won more than half a dozen international competitions in machine translation and natural language understanding. He is a founding member of the UBC Center for Artificial Intelligence Decision-making and Action and is currently a Google Cloud Innovator. He is the founder and director of the UBC Deep Learning and NLP Group, co-director of the I Trust AI Partnership, and co-lead of the Ensuring Full Literacy Partnership, and a founding member and member of the steering committee of the UBC Language Sciences Institute.

In terms of citations, as of mid-February 2023, his Google Scholar profile scores are as follows: more than 3000 citations, an h-index at 24, and an i10-index at 47.

• Adebara, I., Elmadany, A., Abdul-Mageed, M., & Alcoba, A. (2022). AfroLID: A Neural Language Identification Tool for African Languages. In Proceedings of The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022). [link]
• Nagoudi, E., Elmadany, A. & Abdul-Mageed, M. (2022). AraT5: Text-to-Text Transformers for Arabic Language Understanding and Generation. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022). [link]
• Adebara, I., & Abdul-Mageed, M. (2022). Towards Afrocentric NLP for African Languages: Where We Are and Where We Can Go. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022). [link]
• Jawahar, G., Abdul-Mageed, M., & Lakshmanan, L. V. (2022). Automatic Detection of Entity-Manipulated Text using Factual Knowledge. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022). [link]
• Nagoudi, E., Elmadany, A., & Abdul-Mageed, M. (2022). TURJUMAN: A Public Toolkit for Neural Arabic Machine Translation. In Proceedings of The 5th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (LREC 2022). (Best paper award). [link]
• Abdul-Mageed, M., Elmadany, A., & Nagoudi, E. (2021). ARBERT & MARBERT: Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Arabic. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2021). [link]