Dirk Hovy is a Full Professor in the Computing Sciences Department of Bocconi University, and the scientific director of the Data and Marketing Insights research unit. Previously, he was faculty at the University of Copenhagen, got a PhD from USC’s Information Sciences Institute, and a linguistics master’s in Germany.

Dirk is interested in the interaction between language, society, and machine learning, or what language can tell us about society, and what computers can tell us about language. He is also interested in ethical questions of bias and algorithmic fairness in machine learning.

He has authored over 150 articles on these topics, including 3 best and one outstanding paper awards, and published two textbooks on NLP in Python for social scientists.

Dirk has co-founded and organized several workshops (on computational social science, and ethics in NLP), and was a local organizer for the EMNLP 2017 conference. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant project 2020 for research on demographic bias in NLP.

Outside of work, Dirk enjoys cooking, leather-crafting, and picking up heavy things just to put them back down.