About
Dr Scott A. Hale is an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the OII, where he leads the Equitable Access to Quality Information Lab (eaqilab), which focuses on developing and applying new computational approaches to social science questions in the areas of misinformation, agenda setting, hate speech, and collective action. He is particularly interested in LLM alignment and multilingual Natural Language Processing applications as well as putting research into practice with community and media organizations.
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.
Since 2019, Scott has worked with Meedan, a technology nonprofit building tools that empower journalists and civil society in the global fight for reliable, accessible information. In this role, he seeks to bridge academia and industry divides ensuring his research is grounded in real-world challenges and producing real-world impact.
Research Interests
LLM alignment, bias, bilingualism, applications of machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), mobilization and collective action