Future Leaders Fellows

Academics from Cardiff University have been awarded a prestigious UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF).

Out of 101 fellows selected in round four of the scheme, two academics from Cardiff University, Dr Jose Camacho Collados and Dr Dayne Beccano-Kelly, have been awarded Future Leaders Fellowships as part of the £900m scheme run by UKRI.

Dr Jose Camacho Collados is a close collaborator of the Crime and Security Research Institute and is currently a lecturer within Cardiff University’s School of Computer Science.

Dr Camacho Collados’ research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and how computers can understand language. His main focus is on improving NLP models so that they can be more interpretable, can capture commonsense knowledge, and enhance multilingualism, with applications such as tackling disinformation.

Dr Camacho Collados notes “Whilst much current research into disinformation is focused upon metainformation, such as connections between accounts, my work is largely focused upon unpacking the content of the messages.”

“Disinformation content can be very complicated to process as understanding language is generally difficult and often disinformation is spread across languages, which makes multilingual understanding crucial. Furthermore, social networks further complicate these issues as the text is often noisy and short, which poses more problems to automatic systems

The awards will give researchers such as Dr Camacho Collados the time and flexibility to progress their research with a shared common goal of tackling real-world problems that affect everyone’s lives.

The FLF scheme aims to grow the strong supply of talented researchers from diverse backgrounds and career paths to ensure UK research and innovation remains world-class.