Dr. Soroush Vosoughi

Field of Expertise: Natural Language Processing (NLP) | Machine Learning | Computational Social Science​

Dr. Soroush Vosoughi is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College, where he leads the Minds, Machines, and Society group. His research focuses on developing computational models of cognition, with a particular emphasis on language as a primary conduit. Prior to joining Dartmouth, Dr. Vosoughi was a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Media Lab and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center. He earned his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Current Research or Discovery

• Large Language Models (LLMs): Investigating the intricacies of LLMs to understand and mitigate their anti-social tendencies, such as promoting stereotypes and spreading toxicity.​
• Interpretability of AI Models: Developing methods to enhance the transparency and trustworthiness of AI models.​
• Computational Social Science: Creating tools to study social systems and issues, including political polarization, propaganda, bias, rumors, and hate speech.​
• Integration of Visual Information: Incorporating visual data into language models to achieve a more comprehensive representation of rich datasets.​
• Applications in Health and Bioinformatics: Applying LLMs to the health and bioinformatics sectors, drawing parallels between genomic sequences and language.

Affiliation

Dartmouth College:

• Assistant Professor of Computer Science​.
• Technical Associate Director at the Center for Precision Health and Artificial Intelligence.
• Faculty Member of the Institute for Security, Technology, and Society (ISTS)​.
• Faculty Affiliate of the Quantitative Social Science (QSS) program.
• Faculty Affiliate of the Quantitative Biomedical Sciences (QBS) program.
• Faculty Affiliate of the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy & Society.

Previous Positions:

• Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Media Lab.
• Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University

Contributions to Research

Dr. Vosoughi has made significant contributions in several areas:​

• Misinformation on Social Media: Co-authored a pivotal study published in Science that analyzed the spread of true and false news on Twitter, revealing that false news spreads more rapidly than true news.
• Rumor Detection: Developed algorithms for the automatic detection and verification of rumors on Twitter, contributing to the field of computational social science.
• Language Model Alignment: Worked on aligning generative language models with human values and mitigating political bias in language models through reinforced calibration.

Awards

• Google Research Scholar Award (2022): Recognized for work in developing culture-aware language models.
• Amazon Research Award (2019): Awarded for research on protecting online anonymity through linguistic style transfer.
• Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI 2021: Co-authored the paper “Mitigating Political Bias in Language Models through Reinforced Calibration,” which received this honor.

Contact

Email: Soroush.Vosoughi@dartmouth.edu ​