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Dr Scott A. Hale

Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow

Dr Scott A. Hale

Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow

About

Dr Scott A. Hale is an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the OII and a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. He develops and applies techniques from computer science to research questions in the social sciences. His research seeks to see more equitable access to quality information and investigates the spread of information between speakers of different languages online, the roles of bilingual Internet users, collective action and mobilization, hate speech, and misinformation.

Scott graduated with degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Spanish from Eckerd College, FL, USA. During his time at Eckerd, he published computer science research in the area of image processing while working on a larger research project, Darwin, to uniquely identify dolphins from digital photographs. After graduating, he worked in Okinawa, Japan, at the Okinawa Prefectural Education Centre with public school teachers to develop English immersion curricula and with IT professionals to deliver continuing education training through the Internet to staff members and students on outlying islands. He came to the OII as a master’s candidate in October 2009 and completed his DPhil (PhD) at the department in 2015. His DPhil research concentrated on how the design of social media platforms affects the amount of information shared across language divides.

Research Interests

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), bilingualism, applications of machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), social network analysis (SNA), experiments,  complex systems, mobilization and collective action

Positions at the OII

  • Associate Professor, December 2020 -
  • Social Data Science MSc Programme Co-Director, January 2019 - December 2020
  • Senior Research Fellow, September 2018 -
  • Social Data Science Programme Director, February 2017 - December 2018
  • Senior Data Scientist and Research Fellow, June 2016 - August 2018
  • Data Scientist, January 2015 - May 2016
  • DPhil Student, October 2010 - January 2015
  • Research Assistant, May 2010 - December 2014
  • MSc Student, October 2009 - August 2010

Research

Integrity Statement

I currently hold an external funded position working as Director of Research at Meedan, a global technology not-for-profit. In the past five years my work has been financially supported by UK Research and Innovation, the US National Science Foundation, the Omidyar Network, the Alan Turing Institute, the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, DSO National Laboratories, Meta, Google, and Twitter. My research has included collaborative grants with Oxfordshire County Council, BT, Meta, Meedan, and a youth-support charity.  I have served in an advisory capacity to the Daily Edit, Meedan, the UK Government, and Town Square News in the past five years.

Recordings

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News & Press

Teaching

Current Students

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Sherif ElRakabawy

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Owen Henkel

DPhil student, Department of Education, University of Oxford

Past Students

Current Courses

Introduction to Natural Language Processing for the Social Sciences

This course will develop conceptual and technical tools for large-scale analysis of linguistic data such as document collections, transcripts, and blogs.

Data Analytics at Scale

The course will teach computational complexity and how to profile and increase the computational efficiency of Python code. It will also cover parallel and distributed computing approaches, and discuss data storage and retrieval techniques.