Preslav Nakov is Professor and Department Chair for NLP at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. He is part of the core team that developed Jais, the world's best open-source Arabic-centric LLM, as well as part of the LLM360 team at MBZUAI. 

Previously, he was Principal Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, where he led the Tanbih mega-project, developed in collaboration with MIT, which aims to limit the impact of "fake news", propaganda and media bias by making users aware of what they are reading, thus promoting media literacy and critical thinking. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, supported by a Fulbright grant. He is Chair of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), Secretary of ACL SIGSLAV, and Secretary of the Truth and Trust Online board of trustees. Formerly, he was PC chair of ACL 2022, and President of ACL SIGLEX. He is also member of the editorial board of several journals including Computational Linguistics, TACL, ACM TOIS, IEEE TASL, IEEE TAC, CS&L, NLE, AI Communications, and Frontiers in AI. He authored a Morgan & Claypool book on Semantic Relations between Nominals, two books on computer algorithms, and 250+ research papers. He received a Best Paper Award at ACM WebSci'2022, a Best Long Paper Award at CIKM'2020, a Best Resource Paper Award at EACL'2024, a Best Demo Paper Award (Honorable Mention) at ACL'2020, a Best Task Paper Award (Honorable Mention) at SemEval'2020, a Best Poster Award at SocInfo'2019, and the Young Researcher Award at RANLP’2011. He was also the first to receive the Bulgarian President's John Atanasoff award, named after the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer. His research was featured by over 100 news outlets, including Reuters, Forbes, Financial Times, CNN, Boston Globe, Aljazeera, DefenseOne, Business Insider, MIT Technology Review, Science Daily, Popular Science, Fast Company, The Register, WIRED, and Engadget, among others.

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Julia Mendelsohn is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland College of Information. She previously served as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago Data Science Institute and earned her PhD in Information from the University of Michigan School of Information. She also holds a BA in Linguistics and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. 

Her research focuses on the intersection of language, politics, and computation. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches such as natural language processing, political communication, sociolinguistics, and psychology, she studies subtle rhetorical dynamics in online political discourse and their broader societal implications. Her work includes analyzing the framing of sociopolitical issues in media, investigating harmful and implicit language such as dehumanization and dogwhistles (with a recent focus on antisemitism), and advancing computational sociolinguistics to better understand the relationship between language use and social networks.

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