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Doctor Rafael Mestre

Doctor Rafael Mestre

 PhD, MSc, BSc
New Frontiers Fellow

Research interests

  • Multimodal machine learning and Natural Language Processing
  • Computational social science
  • Digital Humanities

More research

Accepting applications from PhD students.

Connect with Rafael

Email: r.mestre@soton.ac.uk

Address: B60, West Highfield Campus, 104-118 Burgess Road, SO17 1TW (View in Google Maps)

About

Dr Mestre joined the University of Southampton in 2021. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Physics by the University of Granada, an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology by KU Leuven and Université Grenoble Alpes and a PhD in Nanobiotechnology by the University of Barcelona. 

He is currently a New Frontiers Fellow in Machine Learning at the School of Electronics and Computer Science of the University of Southampton. Prior to this, he was a Research Fellow in the 'Rebooting Democracy' project at the Politics and International Relations Department. His research is interdisciplinary and lies at the interface of computer science and political science. Much of his research efforts are focused on the development of argumentation mining (and computational social science in general) using multimodal machine learning methods; the study of digital tools for deliberation applied to democratic innovations; the ethics, social implications and governance of emergent technologies like natural language processing (NLP) and bio-hybrid robots; and the application of machine learning in digital humanities. He's a member of the steering committee of the Centre for Democratic Futures (CDF) and an Associate at the Digital Humanities (DH) hub of the University.

In the past, during his PhD, he researched at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) in the development of bio-hybrid robotics and nanorobotics, at the interface of fields like tissue engineering, biomedicine, material science, physics, 3D-bioprinting, robotics and computer vision. He published his research in journals like Science Robotics, Advanced Materials Technologies or Biofabrication, he submitted a patent and collaborated with private companies. 

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