Gavin Abercrombie
I’m an assistant professor at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, where I’m working on mitigation of online harms in the Interaction Lab.
I am Deputy Programme Director of the MSc in Data Science.
From 2022-2026 I was funded by the EPSRC project Equally Safe Online (EP/W025493/1).
I previously worked on the EPSRC project Designing Conversational Assistants to Reduce Gender Bias (EP/T023767/1).
I’m an organiser of the workshops NLPerspectives and CounterSpeech for Online Harms.
You can find my publications here.
You can find my CV here.
Contact:
Find me in room EM1.36.
email: g.abercrombie@hw.ac.uk
Follow me on Bluesky.
News:
July 2026
My MSc student Abubakar Sadiq Muhammad presented work from his project at the ACL Student Research Workshop.
May 2026
Tanvi Dinkar presented our critique of NLP for counterspeech at LREC in Palma de Mallorca, where I also co-organised the 5th Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP.
April 2026
I gave a talk at IMS Stuttgart on current issues with Perspectivist NLP. Thanks to Esra Dönmez for inviting me! I wrote up the talk as a position paper, which was published in the proceedings of this year’s NLPerspectives workshop at LREC.
November 2025
I co-organised the 4th Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP NLPerspectives at EMNLP in Suzhou, China.
July 2025
I’m co-organising and presenting a tutorial on NLP for Counterspeech against Hate and Misinformation at this year’s ACL conference.
December 2024
Tanvi Dinkar and I gave a talk on using participatory design for NLP at University of Edinburgh ILCC
September 2024
Our paper ‘Mirages’ was cited by the AI Safety Institute as motivation for a survey on public attitudes to anthropomorphic technology.
I was invited to take part in a forum on combating disinformation and hate speech, organised by the Spanish government’s Ministry of National Security at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
July 2024
I gave my first keynote talk at the Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance PhD Conference, University of Aberdeen.
June 2024
My MSc student Aashima Poudhar presented her paper on counterspeech strategies at WOAH.
I presented our survey and how-to guide on NLP for counterspeech with Helena Bonaldi at NAACL in Mexico City.
‘I use technology in order to hate it properly.’ Nam June Paik