Kieran Maguire MINDS CDT, 2021

Doctoral Researcher, University of Southampton

Kieran Maguire is a doctoral researcher working on link prediction, the area of AI concerned with estimating whether two entities in a network are likely to be connected. Whether that means predicting a friendship in a social network, a click on a product or a recommendation in a professional platform, link prediction sits at the core of how most online recommendation systems work.

His research examines how the distribution of user interests across a network affects the way link prediction models learn, and how accurately they rank connections for different types of users. The findings have direct implications for the fairness and relevance of recommendations: if a model learns in ways that are shaped by network structure, some users will consistently receive less relevant suggestions than others.

Kieran is completing his thesis and is due to graduate in 2026.