Preslav Nakov

Short bio:

Prior to joining MBZUAI, Professor Nakov worked at the Qatar Computing Research, HBKU where he was a principal scientist. Previously, he was a research fellow at the National University of Singapore (2008–2011) and a researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (2008). He has been an honorary lecturer at Sofia University, Bulgaria since 2014. 

Professor Nakov authored a Morgan and Claypool book titled Semantic Relations Between Nominals (2nd edition in 2021) and two books on computer algorithms. He was also the first to receive the Bulgarian President’s John Atanasoff award, named after the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer. 

Professor Nakov is one of the leading experts on “fake news”, disinformation, fact checking, propaganda, and media bias detection and has published tens of research papers on solutions and stop-gaps for the ever-growing online social media infodemic. 

He’s served on the program committees of the major conferences in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. Most recently, he was a program committee chair of the annual conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022). 

Professor Nakov is president of ACL SIGLEX, the Special Interest Group (SIG) on the Lexicon of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). He is also secretary of SIGSLAV, the ACL SIG on Slavic Natural Language Processing. He also serves on the advisory board of the European Chapter of ACL, and he is a secretary of the Truth and Trust Online TTO) board of trustees. He is an Action Editor for the Computational Linguistics (CL) journal and for the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) journal, an Associate Editor for Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (TASLP) journal, for the IEEE Trans. on Affective Computing journal (TAFFC), for the Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence journal (sections: 1. Language and Computation; 2. Natural Language Processing), and for the AI Communications (AIC) journal, a Member of the Editorial Board of Computer Speech and Language (CSL) and of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering (NLE), and an Editorial Board member of the Language Science Press Book Series on Phraseology and Multiword Expressions. 

His research has been featured in more than 100 news outlets, including MIT Technology Review, Communications of the ACM (Research Highlights), Forbes, Boston Globe, Science Daily, Popular Science, Fast Company, The Register, WIRED, and Engadget.