HCDS Managing Director and Technical Lead staffed

1 April 2022, by Chris Biemann

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Michaela Regneri as Managing Director and Dr. Seid Muhie Yimam as Technical Lead!

About Dr. Michaela Regneri

On April 1st, 2022, Dr. Michaela Regneri has joined HCDS as Managing Director. Before coming back to academia, she worked on different AI applications, digitalization strategies and digital responsibility in corporate contexts.
After her PhD in Computational Linguistics (2013), she joined SPIEGEL-Verlag where she led projects on AI for the newsroom. In 2016, she joined OTTO as Senior Expert for Artificial Intelligence & Cognitive computing. With different teams and collaborators, she managed the development of data science applications for e-commerce, lead applied research for data minimalism, conducted studies on automatization and the future of work and recently co-founded an initiative on digital responsibility.

At HCDS, Michaela Regneri is particularly interested in creating new possibilities for research with the means of AI. She is looking forward to providing tools and consulting to bring the power of data-driven digitalization to all research disciplines, to write and talk about our endeavors and AI in general, and - maybe most importantly - to create a creative & engaging place to work with all people in HCDS.

About Dr. Seid Muhie Yimam 

Since March 23, 2022, Dr. Seid Muhie Yimam has joined HCDS as a Technical Leader. Seid Muhie Yimam has been working as a postdoctoral researcher at LT Group, UHH, since January 2020. He has received his Ph.D. degree from Universität Hamburg, with a specialization in the integration of adaptive machine learning models into annotation tools and NLP applications.
In the last two years, he has been working on multiple research topics including social media NLP (hate speech detection, fake news identification, and sentiment analysis) and low-resource language NLP research, mostly for the Ethiopian language of Amharic that include named entity recognition, semantic models, hate speech detection, and sentiment analysis. He has been teaching NLP courses and supervising Master's projects and thesis in the group.

At HCDS, Seid Muhie Yimam will mostly work on leading and consulting research on digital humanities that involve big data processing of textual content. He will continue teaching NLP and Data science courses in the house while supervising students on interdisciplinary AI and data science research topics. He is currently participating in the development of a research data and knowledge management project, an intersectional project with knowledge management, AI, and library science. The project is envisioned to ingest metadata from research reports and projects automatically from diverse sources to present the outcomes using appealing visualization components.