Dr. Muhammad Abdul-Mageed: Building generative AI language models

THE RESEARCH & ITS IMPACT

Muhammad’s research is in deep learning, the branch of artificial intelligence that has broken records on speech and language processing, machine translation, and image recognition. His work focuses on developing large-scale language models that can improve a wide range of technologies. This research requires specialized hardware such as graphical processing units (GPUs). Sockeye has been used in a number of Muhammad’s research projects, including the analysis of a billion-scale dataset of Tweets in 104 languages to understand the impact of COVID-19 on how humans communicate.  He’s expanding this research to detect machine-generated text. “We can build generative language models that are able to write language that is very realistic," he explains, noting that this research could help with security concerns and the reduction of political and health misinformation online. 

Muhammad’s goal is to build `social’ machines for improved human health, safer social networking, and reduced information overload. He is also a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s Working Group on Language and Literacy, working with academia and industry to develop educational applications of his research at home and abroad. He mentions his recent work on Arabic and other African language translations. “People don’t have access to the same level of material that other countries do, because there’s no translation available for medication, education, news and other valuable information.”