His research focuses on computational sociolinguistics, the interaction of demographic factors and language use on statistical models, and its consequences for performance, fairness, and personalization. He is also interested in ethical questions of bias and algorithmic fairness in ML in general, and recently co-organized the EACL-workshop Ethics in NLP. Dirk received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, and holds a Magister in sociolinguistics from the University of Marburg, Germany. Dirk has authored multiple papers on various NLP topics, and shared best paper awards at EACL 2014, *SEM 2014, and WNUT 2015.