Youssef Al Hariri (PhD Informatics, MSc AI)

Research Associate

Biography

Background

Youssef Al Hariri is a University Teacher and Research Associate at the ILCC, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He received his BSc (Honors) in Computer Engineering from Qatar University in 2017, an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 2018, and a PhD from the same institution. His research interests include computational social science, social network analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing. Currently, he studies human-generated content, networks, and narratives. His work involves applying both qualitative and quantitative analysis to extract and understand the main characteristics of online communities based on their interactions, contributions, and network dynamics.

CV

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Qualifications

  • PhD Informatics (School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh 2023)

  • MSc Artificial Intelligence with Destinction (School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh 2018)

  • Bsc (Honors) Computer Engineering 3.95/4.0 (College of Engineering, Qatar University 2017)

Responsibilities & affiliations

Member of Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation.

Research Associate, School of Informatics, UoE

Member of Social Media Analysis and Support for Humanity (SMASH) Lab (https://smash.inf.ed.ac.uk/), and  Neuropolitics Research Lab (NRLabs) (https://neuropolitics.sps.ed.ac.uk/).

Postgraduate teaching

Text Technologies for Data Science (2023/2024).

Research summary

  • Data Science and Data Analysis
  • Computational Social Science
  • Social Network Analysis and Network Visualisations

Project activity

Project Title: FANToM: Finding Adversary Narratives: Topic and Momentum Goal: To develop an AI-based solution to enhance the usability of a Modelling Audience Interactions dashboard.

Current project grants

Finding Adversary Narratives: Topic and Momentum, Alan Turing Institute.

Past project grants

Project Title: Modelling Audience Interactions
Goal: To propose an end-to-end tool that utilizes state-of-the-art AI techniques for narrative analysis.

Conference details

  • Social Informatics (SocInfo 2019) Paper title: Arabs and Atheism: Religious Discussions in the Arab Twittersphere
  • The 24th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2021) Paper title: Atheists versus Theists: Religious Polarisation in Arab Online Communities

Invited speaker

  • Invited lecture: Social network analysis workshop for students, Edinburgh Future Institute, Edinburgh, Mar 2024
  • Invited lecture: Twitter Data Collection Workshop for Engineering students, SUNY New Paltz, NY, USA, Mar 2022

Papers delivered

  1. Al Hariri Y. & Abu Farha I. (2024). SMASH at AraFinNLP2024: Benchmarking Arabic BERT Models on the Intent Detection, (Accepted May 2024).
  2. Al Hariri Y. & Abu Farha I. (2024). SMASH at StanceEval 2024: Prompt Engineering LLMs for Arabic Stance Detection, (Accepted May 2024).
  3. El Alfy, A., Quigley, J., Tang, L., Al Hariri, Y., & Weber, O. (2024). Sustainability tweeting triumphs during the COP events: analyzing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) communication on Twitter. Journal of Asia Business Studies.
  4. Al Hariri, Y., Chausson S., Ross B., & Magdy W. (2024). TwiXplorer: An Interactive Tool for Narrative Detection and Analysis in Historic Twitter Data, (submitted, appending review).
  5. Chausson S., Al Hariri Y., Ross B., & Magdy W. (2024). The Social Media Undercurrent: Comparing News Coverage and Tweets During the 2022 FIFA World Cup, (submitted, appending review).
  6. Al Hariri Y., Magdy W., Wolters M. (2024), ‘Do Polarized Networks Discuss the Same Topics? Analyzing Arabs’ Topics of Interest According to Their Spirituality’. (under submission)
  7. Brownlie J., Anderson S., Al Hariri Y. (2024), ‘Tales of hope and fears of dupery: in search of the good story’. (under submission)
  8. Al Hariri Y., Magdy W., Wolters, M. K. (2021), ‘Atheists versus Theists: Religious Polarisation in Arab Online Communities’. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, vol 5, CSCW2, Article 361 (October 2021), 28 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479505
  9. Al Hariri, Y., Magdy, W., Wolters, M. (2019). Arabs and Atheism: Religious Discussions in the Arab Twittersphere. In: Social Informatics. SocInfo 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11864. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34971-4_2
  10. Mhaisen, N., Abazeed, O., Al Hariri, Y., Alsalemi A., Halabi, O. (2018). Self-Powered IoT-Enabled Water Monitoring System. 2018 International Conference on Computer and Applications (ICCA) (ICCA-18).
  11. Shata, O., Mhaisen, N., Abazeed, O. & Al Hariri, Y. (2015). Teaching Database Management Systems in Higher Education: An Efficient Approach for Introductory Courses. Sylwan journal. (11).
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