Dr Rafael Mestre is 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.