Congratulations to Dr. Muhammad Abdul-Mageed on receiving two grants from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to undertake research in deep learning and natural language processing. This CFI funding provides researchers with the highly specialized infrastructure they need to be leaders in their field.
The first grant funds the project “Building Infrastructure for Deep Learning of Natural Language” in a total amount of $228,499, from which $190,451 come from CFI and the rest as in-kind contributions.
The second grant is for the project ‘Ensuring Full Literacy in a Multicultural and Digital World’. This project, led by Language Sciences co-director and Psychology professor Janet Werker, and Dr. Abdul-Mageed, has been funded in the amount of $199,969 for research infrastructure associated with Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) research support.
These CFI funds will enable Dr. Abdul-Mageed, his students and collaborators to undertake deep learning research that is otherwise not possible on regular computers without specialized hardware.
“Our goal is to carry out innovative, multidisciplinary, and cutting-edge research with a large group of scholars from around the world to help Canadians succeed in the digital age.” – says Dr. Abdul-Mageed, UBC iSchool and Linguistics Assistant Professor and Language Sciences Research Lead.
Dr. Abdul-Mageed’s research focuses on deep representation learning and natural language socio-pragmatics. The research applications include creating models for improved human health, safer social networking, and reduced information overload. His team also uses machine learning as a vehicle for making discoveries with and about human language.
Recent examples of Dr. Abdul-Mageed’s work include the development of spatial and linguistically-motivated large-scale language models for natural language processing; decoding imagined speech from brain signal; neural detection of misinformation and machine-generated text; multilingual and latent variable neural machine translation; and billion-scale investigation of human communication during COVID-19.
The full story about the CFI grant supporting Dr. Abdul-Mageed’s SSHRC-supported collaboration is available via the UBC Language Sciences Research Cluster.
