Ali F
- Research Program Mentor

PhD at University of Texas Austin (UT Austin)

Expertise

Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Arabic Linguistics

Bio

Ali Farghaly is a Google scholar with over 1500 citations. He is an expert in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence and has published numerous papers in leading journals. Farghaly is a Professor of Linguistics and a former Chairman of the English Department at Academy of Arts in Giza. He also taught at leading US universities such as University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Stanford University in California. He also held key positions at several high-tech companies such as SYSTRAN Software company and Oracle USA. He is also a frequent speaker at international conferences and has been invited to give keynote addresses at several events. He is interested in natural language understanding (NLU) and creating computer systems that come as close as possible to human interaction using natural language. He likes to challenge himself and to challenge his students. He is an extrovert and thus loves human interaction. Mentoring brilliant young students gives him immense personal satisfaction.

Project ideas

Project ideas are meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

People's Happiness

World Happiness Report up to 2020 at kaggle.com The world happiness report used several financial and social parameters to rate the happiness of about 160 countries. The data is available and the parameters used to measure the degree of happiness are well known. One project I propose is to critique the world happiness report and see if there are other parametrs that were not considered but would gaive a more accurate judgement of nations' happines. Second, to look at the individual and devleop a chatbot that would elicit answers to a set of questions posed to individuals. The answers individuals give would then be analyzed and a juudgement is made on the degree of happiness an idividual has.

The Future of Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms have gained much popularity all over the world in the last two decades. This has shrunk the world in terms of knowledge sharing and communication. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are considered the main sources of breaking news these days. They were thought of as empowering individuals to publish their ideas. This was thought of as the democratization of knowledge and the end of censorship on social and political ideas. Recently, social media platforms are accused of being the main source for spreading fake news, hate speech, bullying and even prompting racial intolerance. This research investigates current practices of social media platforms and seek to come up with recommendations for maintaining the democratization of knowledge without promoting fake news and racial intolerance.

Coding skills

Python

Languages I know

Arabic

Teaching experience

I taught Linguistics at Stanford University, Kuwait University and the American University in Cairo. I also taught Arabic Linguistics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As a visiting professor at the Faculty of Computers and Information at Cairo Univerity, Egypt, I taught and supervised research in NLP. I also worked at well established tech companies such as Oracle and SYSTRAN. I have also mentored students both at Polygence and elsewhere. My students did publish their research which was well received.