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Dr Scott A. Hale

Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow
Scott Hale

Dr Scott A. Hale

Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow
(he/him)

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

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.

News & Press

Teaching

Current Students

Past Students

Silhouette

Owen Henkel

DPhil student, Department of Education, University of Oxford

Silhouette

Sherif ElRakabawy

Current Courses

Social Data Science in Practice

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.

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.

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