The anatomy of an AI system for misinformation detection and where humans fit in it

Abstract

Information warfare instruments have recently been used to weaponise misinformation to foster propaganda and to reach political goals by influencing populations at scale. In this seminar, we will discuss how human-in-the-loop AI technology can support expert fact-checking efforts that have been increasing substantially due to the rise in the spread of misinformation. We will first describe the general fact-checking process and then discuss at which steps AI and humans can help. We will look at how Twitter has been crowdsourcing fact-checking, as an example of fact-checking on social media. Finally, we will reflect on the human bias dimension in fact-checking, and at how the concept of truth may change over time and over different definitions of truthfulness.

Speaker

Associate Professor Gianluca Demartini

Dr. Gianluca Demartini is an Associate Professor in Data Science at the University of Queensland, Australia. His main research interests include Information Retrieval, Semantic Web, and Human Computation. His research is currently funded by the Australian Research Council, Facebook, and Google. He received Best Paper awards at the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP) in 2018, at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) in 2016 and 2020, and the Best Demo award at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in 2011. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications including papers at major venues such as WWW, ACM SIGIR, VLDBJ, ISWC, and ACM CHI. He is an ACM Senior Member, ACM Distinguished Speaker, TEDx speaker, and CIKM 2021 General co-chair.

Before joining the University of Queensland, he was Lecturer at the University of Sheffield in UK, post-doctoral researcher at the eXascale Infolab at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, visiting researcher at UC Berkeley, junior researcher at the L3S Research Center in Germany, and intern at Yahoo! Research in Spain. In 2011, he obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Leibniz University of Hanover focusing on Semantic Search.

Host

Dr Caitlin Curtis

Caitlin Curtis is interested in science and technology and its impacts on society. She comes from a robust science foundation in genomics with subsequent training and experience in policy and communication. More recently, her work has expanded to be more interdisciplinary, investigating the impact of science and emerging technology on society - with a particular focus on trust in artificial intelligence and emerging genomics technologies She has a deliberate focus on public and stakeholder engagement to foster the important debates required for the responsible introduction of technology.