MediaFutures

MediaFutures and AI Agora Joint Seminar: The Scientific and Computational Study of Creativity with Geraint A. Wiggins, Professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel
2022-11-01 14:15 - 16:00 (Europe/Oslo)
Geraint A. Wiggins, Professor of Computational Creativity in the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, will give a seminar on 1 November, at 14:15.
TITLE: The Scientific and Computational Study of Creativity
WHEN: Tuesday 1 November, 14:15-16:00.
WHERE: Store læringsrom, læringslab 3. etasje, Media City Bergen

ABSTRACT:
Creativity remains one of the most valued and the most mysterious of human (and sometimes animal) capacities. There are two particular things that make creativity difficult to study. First, it is extremely context-sensitive and subjective. Second, it is not a thing, nor a property of a thing, but rather a property of processes. Both of these properties make creativity elusive; the combination of them produces a dynamic concept which is very hard to pin down. Colton has argued that this is in some sense the correct state of affairs, in that creativity is an essentially contested concept. Geraint does not choose this emergency exit, however, and he aims to outline an alternative philosophy in this talk.
He presents a summary of selected works in creativity studies, related to philosophy, psychology, and computational creativity. He discusses the consequences of these ideas for computational creativity studies, and the related opportunities for the human sciences. He finishes with a set of desiderata for computationally creative systems, in terms of both implementation and behaviour, which themselves may form hypotheses for scientific study of human creativity.
BIO:
Geraint A. Wiggins studied Mathematics and Computer Science at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and holds PhDs in Artificial Intelligence and in Musical Composition, from the University of Edinburgh. He is Professor of Computational Creativity in the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Previously, he was Head of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. He is Associate Editor (English) of Musicae Scientiae, the journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, a consulting editor of Music Perception and an editorial board member of the Journal of New Music Research. From 2000 to 2004, he chaired the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, the UK learned society for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, and from 2004 to 2014, he chaired the international Association for Computational Creativity, of whose Journal he is now Editor-in-Chief. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the Founding Chair of the Dilys Trust, a charity that helps intellectually able but economically disadvantaged young people in the UK attend top class universities.Geraint has worked in artificial intelligence, computer music, and cognitive science since 1984. He was one of the founders of the research field of computational creativity, which studies creative intelligence, and was the first in the world to hold a named professorial chair in that research area. His current work relates to cognitive architectures that explicate the relationship between perception, learning and creativity, in sequential domains, most notably language and music.

MediaFutures and AI Agora Joint Seminar: Understanding Trust and Conversational Agent with Jonas Ivarsson, Professor at the University of Gothenburg
2022-11-01 13:15 - 14:00
Jonas Ivarsson, Professor at the University of Gothenburg, will give a seminar on 1 November, at 13:15.
TITLE: Understanding Trust and Conversational Agent
WHEN: Tuesday 1 November, 13:15-14:00.
WHERE: Store læringsrom, læringslab 3. etasje, Media City Bergen

ABSTRACT:
In recent years, the field of natural language processing has seen substantial developments resulting in robust voice-based interactive services. The quality of the voice and interactivity are sometimes so good that the artificial cannot be differentiated from real persons. Thus, discerning whether an interactional partner is a human or an artificial agent is no longer merely a theoretical question but also a practical problem facing people of ordinary society. Consequently, the ‘Turing test’ has moved from the laboratory into the wild. The passage from the theoretical to the practical domain also accentuates understanding as a topic of continued inquiry. When interactions are successful, but the artificial agent has not been identified as such, can it also be said that the interlocutors have understood each other? In what ways do understanding figure in real-world human–computer interactions? The argument will be made that we need two parallel conceptions of understanding to address these questions. By departing from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, it is illustrated how parties in a conversation regularly deploy two forms of analysis (categorical and sequential) to understand their interactional partner. The interplay between these forms of analysis shapes the developing sense of interactional exchanges and is crucial for established relations. Furthermore, outside of experimental settings, any problems of identifying and categorizing an interactional partner raise concerns regarding trust and suspicion. When suspicion is roused, shared understanding becomes disrupted. The address thus concludes that the proliferation of conversational systems, fueled by artificial intelligence, may have unintended consequences, including its impacts on human–human interactions.
BIO:
Jonas Ivarsson is a professor of informatics. He started in cognitive science and communication studies before moving to education. In 2013 he became a professor of education, where his research focused on the role of various technologies in developing knowledge and competence.
In 2019 he moved to Informatics at the Department of Applied Information Technology at the University of Gothenburg. There, his role is to take the lead on the emerging research on Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence—a specific approach to the interplay between humans and machines in the context of artificial intelligence. Central to this approach are questions relating to how to design AI systems to operate in the context of human users and how to design learning trajectories of humans so that they can intelligently interact with increasingly complex semi-autonomous systems.

Hackathon
2022-10-20 - 2022-10-21
When:
Date and time:20. October from 13:0021. October from 09:00Location: Media City Bergen
What:
We are arranging a hackathon in Bergen the 20-21st October. We will have one and a half days (and an evening with pizza & coding), and we’ll try to create some new and interesting experiments or demonstrations.
If you have any ideas, please summarize quickly and send to njbo@norceresearch.no.
It’s also important that we have the necessary datasets as well, so have that in mind!
Current ideas:– Automatic subtitles using Whisper. We’ve already done some work on this (both TV and podcasts), and will try to focus more on visualizations and end user experience. What could be products using this technology and for what content?– Football visualizations of automatically detected information. Pete creates datasets tracking and positioning players and the ball – how can we use this to make added value services that are interesting for viewers? Games? Additional information?– Compare different subtitles? Are summarized subtitles better than verbatim? Are “fancysubs” that provide information about who speaks easier to read or comprehend? We have at least one good eye tracker available for this.
Contact: Njål Borch, WP 4 leader, njbo@norceresearch.no
Register: https://skjemaker.app.uib.no/view.php?id=13533119
Photo credit: Be-novative

MediaFutures Seminar: Media Accessibility: Current Solutions and Future Challenges with Pilar Orero, Professor from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
2022-10-04 13:00 - 14:00 | MediaFutures HQ, 3rd Floor, Tower 1, Media City, Media Futures HQ, 3rd floor, Bergen, 5008
Pilar Orero, Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), will give a seminar on 4 October, at 13:00.
TITLE: MedIa Accessibility: Current Solutions and Future Challenges
WHEN: Tuesday 4 October, 13:00-14:00. There will be a lunch served at 12:30.
WHERE: MediaFutures & Online
Zoom Meetinghttps://uib.zoom.us/j/64942261686?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 649 4226 1686Password: [REDACTED]
ABSTRACT:
The presentation will start describing the current situation of media accessibility, which is at an unprecedented moment for accessibility. The EU legal framework has forced national transpositions with concrete requirements. The European Accessibility Centre will open next year, and funding for research by EC is at all times high. Accessibility has moved from being an object of study, as a silo, to a horizontal prerequisite in any call where humans are involved. This presentation will inform of existing funded solutions and identify possible challenges that may need funding.
BIO:
Professor Pilar Orero, PhD (UMIST, UK) works at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) in the TransMedia Catalonia Lab. She has written and edited many books, near 100 academic papers and almost the same number of book chapters –all on Media Accessibility. Leader and participant on numerous EU funded research projects focusing on media accessibility. She works in standardisation and participates in the UN ITU IRG-AVA – Intersector Rapporteur Group Audiovisual Media Accessibility, ISO and ANEC. She has been working on Immersive Accessibility for the past 4 years first in a project called ImAc, which results are now further developed in TRACTION, MEDIAVERSE, MILE, and has just started to work on green accessibility in GREENSCENT. She leads the EU network LEADME on Media Accessibility.
For more info please go to https://gent.uab.cat/pilarorero

Innovation Workshop with Sofie Hvitved
2022-09-30 09:00 - 12:00
We are pleased to invite you to a half-day innovation workshop on 30. September, 2022, at Media City Bergen. The workshop is targeted towards academics and industry personnel involved in various levels at MediaFutures.
The workshop has the following goals:
– Get an overview of different methods, processes and definitions for innovation
– Understanding futuredriven innovation
– Facilitating a knowledge sharing process preferably ending in some kind of shared understanding of the term ‘innovation’ in relation to the media and media tech industry
The workshop will be led and facilitated by Sofie Hvidtved from Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies. She is Head of Media at the Institute and is strongly engaged in the intersection between media and technology, where she works with the development and execution of strategy and innovation projects. More information about Sofie Hvitved (cifs.dk).
There are 30 places available for the workshop and we have chosen to reserve 15 places for academic and 15 for industry partners.
We will inform you about who has gotten a place by Friday 16th September.
Date and time: 30. September 09:00-12:00
Place: Medielabben, Media City Bergen
Deadline for signing up: Thursday 15th September
Sign up by filling out this form: https://skjemaker.app.uib.no/view.php?id=13281998

MediaFutures Seminar: Building Knowledge Graphs with Media Content and Application for Tackling Misinformation with Raphael Troncy, Associate Professor at EURECOM
2022-09-20 10:00 - 11:00 | MediaFutures HQ, 3rd Floor, Tower 1, Media City, Media Futures HQ, 3rd floor, Bergen, 5008
Raphael Troncy, Associate Professor at EURECOM, will give a seminar on 20 September, at 10:00.
TITLE: Building Knowledge Graphs with Media Content and Application for Tackling Misinformation
WHEN: Tuesday 20 September, 10:00-11:00WHERE: MCB Store læringsrom, Læringslab 3rd floor. / ZOOM:
https://uib.zoom.us/j/67861782423?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 678 6178 2423
Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
The sheer volume of multimedia content created every day across the many disparate distribution channels keeps challenging any traditional content management system. Routine tasks such as archiving, editing, content organization and retrieval by multimedia creators become prohibitively costly. On the user side, the amount of multimedia content pumped daily can be simply overwhelming and the need for shorter and more personalized content has never been more pronounced. Recommending, enriching and summarizing content can help to capitalize on users’ engagement and generate their interactions.In this talk, I will first present several Knowledge Graphs developed with medias being radio and TV programs broadcaster in Europe, news items published by a news agency or even social media posts shared on Twitter or Facebook. Next, I will present a number of tools that contribute to automatic multimedia understanding by computers, ranging from extracting topics using common sense knowledge or language models to recognizing recurring people in images. I will show how difficult it is for computers to decompose content into meaningful segments. I will show how to extract highlights from media content, both for narrative-focused summarization and for maximising memorability and I will conclude with our current efforts aiming at tackling misinformation.
BIO:
Raphael Troncy is an Associate Professor at the Data Science Department of EURECOM. He received his PhD from Grenoble University (France) in 2004 and held research positions at INA (France), CNR (Italy) and CWI (The Netherlands). He published more than 250 scientific papers in various journals, top tier conferences and associated workshops and held key organisational roles in multiple world-leading conferences. He was the General Chair of The Web Conference in 2022. He is an expert in knowledge engineering, information extraction and recommender systems. He is the principla investigator of many national and european projects where semantic technologies and information extraction are used together to build knowledge graphs, exploratory search engines and recommender systems.

MORS: Workshop on Multi-Objective Recommender Systems
2022-09-18 - 2022-09-23
When:
18. – 23. September 2022

What:
The 2nd workshop on Multi-Objective Recommender Systems (MORS) will be held in Seattle, USA in conjunction with the 16th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. The workshop, with the aim of the gathering researchers and industry experts to discuss the significance and complications of incorporating multiple objectives into the recommender systems, will take place between September 18th and 23rd (exact date to be announced).
Associate Professor Mehdi Elahi at the University of Bergen, and MediaFutures Work Package 2 leader is one of the organizers of the workshop, along with:

Himan Abdollahpouri (Spotify, USA)

Shaghayegh Sahebi (University at Albany, State University of New York, USA)

Masoud Mansoury (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Babak Loni (ING group, Netherlands)

Zahra Nazari (Spotify, USA)

Maria Dimakopoulou (Spotify, USA)

The theme of this year’s workshop is Long-term Optimization in Recommender Systems. The organizers now invite submissions of papers on the following topics:

Recommender systems with multiple objectives

Balancing the long-term impacts of the recommendations and the users’ short-term preferences

Reinforcement Learning for long-term optimization in recommender systems

Feedback loops and the impact of recommendations in long term

Value-aware recommendation (profit, value, purpose, etc.)

The trade-off between relevance and bias in recommender systems

Recommendation with multiple stakeholders

Conflict handling in multi-stakeholder recommendation

Fairness-aware recommender systems

You can read more about the workshop:

https://sites.google.com/view/mors-2022/home
https://recsys.acm.org/recsys22/mors/

For updates regarding the workshop, follow @MORS 2022
More information about the 16th ACM Conference can be found here.

MediaFutures Seminar: How Newspapers Use Audience Analytics and Metrics with Thomas Husken, Data Analyst at Bergens Tidende
2022-09-09 12:00 - 13:00 | MediaFutures HQ, 3rd Floor, Tower 1, Media City, Media Futures HQ, 3rd floor, Bergen, 5008
Thomas Husken, Data Analyst at Bergens Tidende, will give a seminar on 9 September, at 12:00.
TITLE: How newspapers use audience analytics and metrics
WHEN: Friday 9 September, 12:00-13:00WHERE: MediaFutures

In this workshop, Thomas Husken, data scientist in Bergens Tidende (BT), will talk about the usage of news audience data, various metrics, and analytics inside a news organization. Thomas is part of BT data analytics department, working on frontpage optimization, creation and maintenance of various analytical dashboards, and many other analytical tasks. Newsrooms around the world have become centered around dashboards, overloaded with metrics, and news work is growingly data-driven. Ongoing research is revealing how analytics and metrics influences journalism culture, work routines, news values, news selection, among other. However, beyond gaining knowledge about effects on work process which are reflected in content that consumers of media get, we need to look deeper into technical insides of audience analytics and metrics, or infrastructures for utilization of data about audience news use. In that respect, Thomas Husken will provide unique insights into the audience analytics and metrics in BT as one of the oldest and the largest newspapers (measured by circulation) in Norway.
The workshop is primarily aimed at PhD and Postodoctoral researchers, but also at others interested in various technological aspects of media work.

Program:
Short introduction – Ana Milojevic (Postdoc Fellow, MediaFutures)
How newspapers use analytics and metrics – Thomas Husken (Data Scientist, BT)
Questions and answers

Register your interest in workshop by sending e-mail to Ana Milojevic.

Visual Computing Forum: The Future of Mobile Interaction with Prof. Morten Fjeld
2022-09-09 10:15 - 11:15
TITLE: The Future of Mobile Interaction
WHEN: Friday 9 September, 10:15-11:15WHERE:510N3 (Blåbær), 5th Floor, Thormøhlens Gate 55, Høyteknologisenteret
Zoom: https://uib.zoom.us/j/67048590477?pwd=[REDACTED]
ABSTRACT:

The use of computerized devices is now ubiquitous in many societies. Our daily lives are shaped by perpetually changing interactive devices and applications, from touch-based smartwatches and tablets to large digital displays. Yet while smart devices, such as laptops, pads, and smartphones, are mobile, their users are typically either stationary or risking their physical safety using such devices while in- motion. The health effects of today’s mobile devices are well-documented. These effects include the impact of a predominantly sedentary lifestyle on both health and well-being of many individuals. This talk will present high-risk thinking, design, and engineering research into the domain on mobile user interaction.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY:

Morten Fjeld is a professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Bergen (Norway) and Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden). His research activities are situated in the field of Human- Computer Interaction with a focus on tangible and tabletop user computing. In 2005, he founded the t2i Interaction Lab at Chalmers, Sweden. He holds a dual MSc degree in applied mathematics from NTNU (Trondheim, Norway) and ENSIMAG (Grenoble, France), and a PhD from ETH (Zurich, Switzerland). In 2002, Morten Fjeld received the ETH Medal for his PhD titled “Designing for Tangible Interaction”. In 2011, he was a visiting professor at NUS Singapore, in 2016 and 2017 at Tohoku University, Japan, and in 2019 to 2020 at ETH Zurich. Morten Fjeld also has extensive industrial experience in the areas of fluid mechanics, simulators, and user interface design.
Full bio: https://www.uib.no/personer/Morten.Fjeldt2i Lab Norway: http://t2i.not2i Lab Sweden: http://t2i.sehttps://dblp.org/pid/f/MortenFjeld.html https://scholar.google.no/citations?user=ZQhqxscAAAAJ&hl=sv&oi=ao

MediaFutures Seminar: Mind the Gaps and Normal Accidents with Dirk Hovy. Associate Professor, Bocconi University in Milan, Italy.
2022-06-16 14:00 - 15:00
Dirk Hovy, Associate Professor of computer science at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, will give a seminar on 16 June, at 14:00.
TITLE: Mind the Gaps and Normal AccidentsWHEN: Thursday 16 June, 14:00-15:00WHERE: Zoom – https://uio.zoom.us/j/61874196241?pwd=[REDACTED]

Meeting ID: 618 7419 6241

Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
NLP is now stable enough to be used in production systems, and will soon become even more pervasive. However, even today’s systems are already highly complex and unpredictable. As they become more ubiquitous, different algorithms will interact with each other directly leading to tightly coupled systems whose capacity to cause harm we will be unable to predict. In his book Normal Accidents, the sociologist Charles Perrow proposed a framework to analyze technologies and their risks according to their complexity and the interdependence of their components. He showed that accidents were nigh on unavoidable due to those two features. We apply Perrow’s framework to NLP to assess its potential risks. We argue that under the current paradigm, “normal accidents” are built into the system, and that it is only a matter of time before they emerge. Some issues in current NLP practice that aid this development are:
– the early adoption of methods without sufficient understanding or analysis;
– the preference for computational methods regardless of risks associated with their limitations;
– the dangers of unexplainable methods.
If these issues are not addressed, we risk a loss of reproducibility, reputability, and subsequently public trust in our field. However, these factors can help us plan better for making our systems safer and more reliable.
BIO:
Dirk Hovy is associate professor of computer science at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Before that, he was faculty and a postdoc in Copenhagen, got a PhD from USC, and a linguistics masters in Germany. He is interested in the interaction between language, society, and machine learning, or what language can tell us about society, and what computers can tell us about language. He has authored over 70 articles on these topics, including 3 best paper awards. He has organized one conference and several workshops (on abusive language, ethics in NLP, and computational social science). Dirk recently received an ERC Starting Grant for a project on demographic factors and bias in NLP. Outside of work, Dirk enjoys cooking, running, and leather-crafting. For updated information, see https://www.dirkhovy.com

MediaFutures Seminar: Augment the Vision: To Help Users Deal with Different Domain Tasks. PhD Candidate, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
2022-06-15 12:00 - 13:00
Yuchong Zhang, PhD candidate at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, will give a seminar on 15 June, at 12:00.
TITLE: Augment the Vision: To Help Users Deal with Different Domain TasksWHEN: Wednesday 15 June, 12:00-13:00WHERE: MediaFutures

ABSTRACT:
One of the cutting-edge techniques—augmented reality (AR) (a variation of virtual reality (VR)), in which virtual objects are superimposed in the real world–has been demonstrated and applied in numerous fields due to its capability of providing interactive interfaces of visualized digital content. Moreover, AR can provide functional tools that support users undertaking domain-related tasks, especially facilitating them in data visualization and interaction because of its ability to jointly augment the physical space and the user’s perception. How to fully use the advantages of AR technique, especially the items which augment human vision to help users with different domain tasks’ perform is the central part of my PhD research.
BIO:
Yuchong Zhang is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. His research interests include augmented reality, interactive visualization and human-centred design. He received his MSc. degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2017.

MediaFutures WP1 DIGSSCORE-Workshop
2022-06-15 10:00 - 13:00
WP1 DIGSSCORE-Workshop
Open for all MediaFutures Partners. The first part will be in English, and the second part will be in Norwegian/Scandinavian.
WHERE: Zoom – https://uib.zoom.us/j/65597060274?pwd=[REDACTED]

Part 1 (10:00 – 11:00) Introduction to DIGSSCORE
10:00-10:05: Welcome
10:05-10:45: Introduction to DIGSSCORE by Erik Knudsen: What is it and what can MediaFutures partners use it for? (20 minutes presentation and 20 minutes for questions)
10:45-11:00 Coffee break
Part 2 (11:00-13:00) WP1 workshop in Scandinavian (with WP1 partners)
11:00-11:15: Introduction to Schibsted’s research interests on hard-to-reach audiences and constructive journalism (10 minutes presentation and 5 minutes for questions)
11:15-11:30: Introduction to NRK’s research interests on constructive journalism (10 minutes presentation and 5 minutes for questions).
11:30-11:45: Discussing and finding overlapping interests for research
11:45-12:00 Coffee break
12:00-12:15: Opportunities for researching constructive journalism and hard-to-reach audiences using DIGSSCORE.
12:15-12:45: Designing the study
12:45-13:00: Summing up and the road ahead

Future Week. MediaFutures Workshop: Towards Responsible Media Technology & Innovation
2022-06-09 09:30 - 12:00
As part of the Media City Bergen Future Week, MediaFutures will hold workshop on June 9.
TITLE: Towards Responsible Media Technology & Innovation
WHEN: Thursday 9 June, 09:30-12:00WHERE: Media City Bergen
REGISTRATION: https://mediacitybergen.no/future-week-22/
In this workshop, you will learn from MediaFutures’ young researchers in five work packages how new media technologies for media user engagement, media content production, media content interaction and accessibility, and audience understanding are developed and advanced to the next level. No matter if you are a journalist, a media practitioner, a developer, a researcher, or a curious individual, you will open a new horizon before you on responsible media technology and innovation.

The topics we’ll touch upon during the workshop are:
– Understanding media experience– User Modeling, Personalization & – Engagement– Media Content Analysis and – Production– Media Content Interaction & Accessibility– Norwegian Language Technologies

Program:
1. Christoph Trattner (Center Director): Opening and welcome speech
2. Mehdi Elahi (Associate Prof./WP Leader, WP2): “Research on Responsible Recommendation”
3. Jonathan Geffen (PhD Candidate, WP4): “Playing the News – Newsgames 101”
4. Ana Milojevic (Postdoc Fellow, WP1): “Connecting Media and Users – Analytics and Metrics ”
5. Coffee Break
6. Sohail Ahmed Khan (PhD Candidate, WP3): “Visual Content Verification in Era of Deepfakes”
7. Huiling You (PhD Candidate, WP5): “Event Extraction from News Articles”
8. Round table discussion
9. Wrap-up

Wolftech & MediaFutures Joint Seminar: Human Interaction and Collaboration with Machine Learning Models. Hendrik Strobelt, IBM Research / MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
2022-05-20 15:00 - 16:00
Hendrik Strobelt, the Explainability Lead at the MIT-IBM Watson AI lab, will give a seminar on 20 May, at 15:00.
TITLE: Human Interaction and Collaboration with Machine Learning models
WHEN: Friday 20 May, 15:00-16:00WHERE: Zoom:
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZErdeiurz0tGtGEcOjhfEQBEwTKqcblgjju
Meeting ID:

Password:

[REDACTED]
With the increasing adoption of machine learning models across domains, we have to think about the human role when interacting with these models. In the last years, my collaborators and I have created a series of tools that utilize visualization and visual user interaction to help investigate behavior of machine learning models (for NLP and CV) and that might help creating algorithms to detect fake text. I will present a selection of these scientific tools that makes humans play and then understand.
BIO:
Hendrik Strobelt is the Explainability Lead at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Research Scientist at IBM Research, and currently professor at University of Konstanz. His recent research is on visualization for and human collaboration with AI models to foster explainability and intuition. His work involves NLP models and generative models while he is advocating to utilize a mix of data modalities to solve real-world problems. His research is applied to tasks in machine learning, in NLP, in the biomedical domain, and in chemistry. Hendrik joined IBM in 2017 after postdoctoral positions at Harvard SEAS and NYU Tandon. He received a Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) from the University of Konstanz in computer science (Visualization) and holds an MSc (Diplom) in computer science from TU Dresden. His work has been published at venues like IEEE VIS, ICLR, ACM Siggraph, ACL, NeurIPS, ICCV, PNAS, Nature BME, or Science Advances. He received multiple best paper/honorable mention awards at EuroVis, BioVis, VAST, ACL Demo, or NeurIPS demo. He received the Lohrmann medal from TU Dresden as the highest student honor. Hendrik has served in program committees and organization committees for IEEE VIS, BioVis, EuroVis. He served on organization committees for IEEE VIS, VISxAI, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS. Hendrik is visiting researcher at MIT CSAIL. (more: https://hendrik.strobelt.com)

MediaFutures Seminar: Media entertainment experiences among youth on global platforms. Marika Lüders, Professor at the University of Oslo
2022-05-13 12:00 - 13:00
Marika Lüders, Professor at the University of Oslo, will give a seminar on 13 May, at 12:00.
TITLE: Media entertainment experiences among youth on global platformsWHEN: Friday 13 May, 12:00-13:00WHERE: Zoom –
https://uib.zoom.us/j/68002953641?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 680 0295 3641

Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
The media and platforms taken for granted by those born since the turn of the millennium are often interpreted as causing unprecedented competition for national and legacy players in the field of media entertainment. Accordingly, notions such as “lost generation” signal how legacy media perceive re-engagement with youth audiences as core to their future existence. In this talk I will first address how the notion of youth as a lost generation serves a strategic function in the media entertainment sector by legitimating actions. I will next report from how we study teens’ media entertainment experiences in the research project “Global Natives? Serving young audiences on global platforms”. By enquiring the media entertainment experiences of youth as constituted by content produced by legacy media and what is often termed “social media entertainment”, we hope to advance knowledge on youth as a media generation.
BIO:
Marika Lüders is a Professor at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. She has almost 20 years of experience in researching user/audience experiences, social media, global platforms, and the intersections of the material and experiential levels of digital technologies. Lüders is currently the project leader of the research project “Global Natives? Serving young audiences on global platforms” (2021-2025).

Human-Computer Interaction lecture series: UX Research Design in Practice: Some Examples from Safety Critical Industrial Environments. Dr Duy Le, senior research scientist at VNUHCM University of Science, Vietnam
2022-05-04 14:15 - 15:00
Dr. Duy Le, a senior research scientist and head of the Human-Computer Interaction division of SELab, VNUHCM University of Science, Vietnam, will give a seminar on May 4, at 14:15.
TITLE: UX Research Design in Practice: Some Examples from Safety Critical Industrial Environments
WHEN: Wednesday 4 May, 14:15-15:00WHERE: MediaFutures and Zoom:
https://uib.zoom.us/j/69626023560?pwd=[REDACTED]

Meeting ID: 696 2602 3560
Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
A typical user experience (UX) research and design process is a sequence of user empathization, problem definition, solution ideation, designing, and evaluation. However, how this sequence is executed in practice can have several variants, heavily depending on the resources and the constraints of the environment where the UX work is performed. In this talk, we will explore some exemplary UX research and design projects targeting manufacturing plants, which are examples of safety critical industrial environments. The talk will highlight some particular contextual constraints in this kind of environment and then present how UX practitioners flexibly applied the typical design process to comply with the constraints while still adequately ensuring the quality of a user-centered design work. Besides that, the talk will also demonstrate how different types of creative media such as storyboard, paper-sketched user interfaces, animated mockups, and games can be flexibly used in industrial UX research and design projects.
BIO:
Dr. Duy Le is currently a senior research scientist and head of the human-computer interaction division of SELab, VNUHCM University of Science, Vietnam. He is an HCI researcher with rich working experiences both in academia and industry. He obtained a PhD degree in human-computer interaction from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. Prior to joining VNUHCM University of Science, he had two years working as a research scientist in the UX research group of ABB Research Sweden where he performed several UX research projects spanning across human-robot interaction, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and human-automation interaction. In his current position, Duy is leading research on intelligent interactive systems, which aim to combine user-centered design, artificial intelligence and cutting edge interactive technologies such as interactive surfaces, AR, VR, and embodied interfaces to improve user efficacy and provide novel experiences.

Human-Computer Interaction lecture series: Visual Attention in Face-to-Face and Computer-Mediated Interactions. Katarzyna Wisiecka, PhD Candidate in Psychology and Informatics at SWPS University & Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology.
2022-05-04 11:15 - 12:00
Katrzyna Wisiecka, PhD candidate in psychology and informatics at SWPS University & Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology, will give a seminar on May 4th, at 11:15.
TITLE: Visual Attention in Face-to-Face and Computer-Mediated Interactions
WHEN: Wednesday 4 May, 11:15-12:00WHERE: MediaFutures and Zoom:
https://uib.zoom.us/j/61410167655?pwd=[REDACTED]

Meeting ID: 614 1016 7655
Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
Computer-mediated interaction has become an integral part of our daily routines. Despite decreased non-verbal communication and face-to-face contact with partners of collaboration, people learned how to remotely work together. The consequences of decreased non-verbal signals such as gaze communication on collaboration quality in remote settings are however not fully investigated. The present PhD project intends to examine in four eye tracking experiments the role of visual attention during face-to-face and computer-mediated interaction. The project has three interrelated aims: (1) examining the relationship between interaction quality and gaze patterns in remote and face-to-face collaboration; (2) facilitating workspace awareness among collaborators by visualization of the partner’s gaze direction; (3) investigate whether gaze communication enhances physiological synchronization measured by heart rate variability (HRV) in computer-mediated collaboration. Current results suggest that remote collaboration is challenging for participants and its quality benefits from gaze visualizations during task solving. Enhancing gaze communication during remote collaboration has the potential to increase physiological synchronization between collaborators. Broadening the knowledge about physiological correlates of computer-mediated collaboration is a step to develop gaze-based solutions tailored to remote interactions.
BIO:
Katarzyna Wisiecka, M.A. in clinical psychology, current PhD candidate in psychology and informatics at SWPS University & Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology. She is a member of the Eye Tracking Research Center at SWPS University. Her main research interests include social synchronization and gaze communication in computer environments. She is a scholarship holder in grants funded by the National Science Center and National Centre for Research and Development in Poland. She also takes part in numerous international projects including media accessibility and human-computer interaction such as LEAD-ME funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the EU.

MediaFutures Seminar: Fairness—Are algorithms a burden or a solution? Dr. Christine Bauer, Assistant Professor at Utrecht University
2022-04-21 13:00 - 14:00
Dr. Christine Bauer, Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, will give a seminar on 21 April, at 13:00.
TITLE: Fairness—Are algorithms a burden or a solution?WHEN: Thursday 21 April, 13:00-14:00WHERE: Zoom –
https://uib.zoom.us/j/66369080035?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 663 6908 0035

Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
Recommender systems play an important role in everyday life. These systems assist users in choosing products to buy, movies to watch, or news articles to read. With their wide usage, there is an increasing pressure that such systems are fair. Besides serving diverse groups of users, recommenders need to represent and serve item providers in a fair manner, too. But what is fair? In this talk, I will present research on fairness in music recommender systems taking the artists’ perspective. What do artists consider fair? Are algorithms a burden or a solution? In particular, I will zoom in on recent research on gender bias in music recommenders and how we can address this issue.
BIO:
Dr. Christine Bauer is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She is an experienced teacher in a wide spectrum of topics in computing and information systems—ranging from algorithms to adaptive interactive systems to research methods. Her research activities center on interactive intelligent systems. Thereby, she takes a human-centered computing approach, where technology follows humans’ and society’s needs. Central themes in her research are context and context-adaptivity. In the recent years, she worked on context-aware recommender systems. Core interest in her current research activities are fairness and multi-method evaluations. Further information can be found at https://christinebauer.eu.

UiB AI #2 But, why? - make AI answer!
2022-04-08 10:00 - 12:00
Welcome to the second seminar in the UiB AI seminar series. The event is open to all employees and students at UiB. Prior registration is required.
TITLE: UiB AI #2 But, why? – make AI answer!
WHEN: Friday 8 April, 10:00-12:00WHERE: Universitetsaulaen, Muséplassen 3, Bergen
Seminar registration
Background:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly involved in decision making. Decision-making can be a monotonous task that involves a lot of routine operations and the processing of vast amounts of information. Involving artificial intelligence is a possibility to spare human time and allow for it to be used in a more meaningful way, both for society and for the individuals involved.
Decisions by AI can mean many different things. On one hand, machine learning is used to identify who is most likely to pass the exam, how much your house will be appraised for, or how likely malignant that spot is on your mammography image. On the other hand, automated decision-makers are built to follow a specific set of rules. When a decision affects our life, we would like to know how and why that decision was made. Knowing why helps scientists and engineers improve the automated decision-making tools. It also helps individuals to retain their autonomy. If you do not know why, you cannot possibly do anything to change a decision. Not knowing why makes the personal experience the same as being subjected to a roll of a dice deciding the value of your property and the quality of your life.
To explain means to provide information about a process that is meaningful, useful and understandable to the person for whom it is intended. Not all AI methods `shed’ enough information for a meaningful explanation to be feasible. It is not that the why exists somewhere and the AI method would not admit to it. Machine learning algorithms produce models of correlations in the data. The data is a numerical representation of the real world. There might be a reason in the real world why two phenomena are related. A machine learning model can correctly identify that relation without having access to, or making use of, the reasons for it. AI methods that rely on symbolic representations by design produce `reason based’ decisions. However, those reasons are not explanations, just the material from which explanations are built.
How do we build AI that explains its decisions? There are numerous challenges to be addressed both in providing material for explanations and constructing explanations. Ultimately, some AI approaches would always be more explanation friendly than others. One can break a walnut with a sledgehammer, but we do not use sledgehammers for this purpose because they tend to destroy the walnut. Analogously, an AI approach can be used for a decision-making purpose, but its explainability should be matched with a consideration of what impact do the produced decisions have. Otherwise, we risk breaking something we cherish.
In this seminar we will describe how AI – sees the world and makes decisions. We will elucidate what happens when we say the AI reasons and the AI learns. We will discuss how researchers are trying to change different AI methods to gain more explainability from AI.
BIO:
Samia Touileb is a researcher at MediaFutures working on Norwegian Language Technologies. Her main research interests are information extraction, sentiment analysis, bias and fairness in NLP, and applications of NLP and machine learning methods to tasks within social science research. She holds a PhD in Information Science with a focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP) from the University of Bergen, was a Postdoc at the Language Technology Group at the University of Oslo, and has been working within research in and applications of AI and NLP for almost a decade.
Ghazaal Sheikhi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at MediaFutures. Her research interests revolve around machine learning, natural language processing and textual content analysis. She holds a PhD in Computer engineering (Machine Learning) from Eastern Mediterranean University, North Cyprus and a master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology, Teheran, Iran.

MediaFutures Seminar: Detecting Fake News by Using Weakly Supervised Learning. Assoc. Prof. Özlem Özgöbek
2022-03-17 13:00 - 14:00
Dr. Özlem Özgöbek, Associate Professor at NTNU, Norway will give a seminar on 17 March, at 13:00.
TITLE: Detecting Fake News by Using Weakly Supervised LearningWHEN: Thursday 17 March, 13:00-14:00WHERE: Zoom –
https://uib.zoom.us/j/64607939290?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 646 0793 9290

Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
Spread and existence of fake news has been amplified by the advancements in internet and social media. Today, it is one of the most important problems that affects the society. Various artificial intelligence methods have been used to address the automatic detection of fake news. However, the complex and dynamic nature of news makes this task challenging. In this talk, I’m going to address some of these challenges and present an ongoing work on fake news detection by using weakly supervised learning.
BIO:
Dr. Özlem Özgöbek works as an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science at NTNU. Her research focuses on recommender systems, privacy issues in recommender systems and disinformation detection for online news. She is a co-founder of Norwegian Big Data Symposium (NOBIDS) and actively involved in organizing INRA workshop series since 2014.

MediaFutures Seminar: Visual Content Verification in the News Domain. PhD Candidate Sohail Ahmed Khan
2022-02-25 11:00 - 12:00
Sohail Ahmed Khan, PhD Candidate from MediaFutures, University of Bergen, Norway will give a seminar on 25 February, at 11:00.
TITLE: Visual Content Verification in the News DomainWHEN: Friday 25 February, 11:00-12:00WHERE: Zoom – https://uib.zoom.us/j/66009400805?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 660 0940 0805

Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
The purpose of the talk is to get valuable comments and suggestions from the industrial partners about visual content verification in the news domain. I will talk about the research questions which I plan to answer during my PhD. This project is associated with Task 3.2 at MediaFutures’ WorkPackage-3 (Multimedia Content Analysis and Production) aiming to develop tools/prototypes for visual content verification. I will talk about visual content verification in the news domain while focusing on three research questions, namely 1) how the journalists and news rooms verify visual user generated content they encounter online, 2) how to effectively combat deep fake media, and 3) how to fight mis/disinformation shared online in the form of cheap fake media? Our expectations from this project are 1) advancing the state-of-the-art in automated multimedia content verification and 2) developing prototypes based on the proposed models which can be employed for multimedia content verification by the industry partners.
BIO:
Sohail is a PhD candidate at MediaFutures and University of Bergen. He holds an MSc in Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sheffield, UK. Prior to joining MediaFutures, Sohail worked as a research assistant at Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Before that, he worked as a remote research assistant at CYENS Centre of Excellence, Nicosia, Cyprus. His research interests intersect deep learning, computer vision and multimedia forensics. Sohail is currently associated with the MediaFutures’ Work Package 3, Media Content Analysis and Production.

MediaFutures Seminar: News diversity and recommendation systems: An interdisciplinary approach. Dr. Kristin Van Damme.
2022-02-11 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Kristin Van Damme, a senior researcher from Artevelde University of Applied Sciences, will give a seminar on 11 February at 12:00.
TITLE: News diversity and recommendation systems: An interdisciplinary approach.WHEN: Friday 11 February, 12:00-13:00WHERE: Zoom – https://uib.zoom.us/j/68035691403?pwd=[REDACTED] ID: 680 3569 1403Password: [REDACTED]
ABSTRACT:
Concerns about selective exposure and filter bubbles in the digital news environment have raised questions on how news recommendation systems can be more citizen-oriented so that they facilitate – rather than limit – the normative aims of journalism. In response to this question, the NewsDNA project aimed at developing an algorithm that uses news diversity as a key driver for personalized news recommendation. To do so, we combined insights from multiple research disciples: computer sciences (news recommendation systems); communication sciences (conceptualisations of news diversity); law (right to receive information) and computational linguistics (automated content extraction from text). As such, we hoped to give stakeholders – such as policymakers and news producers – a realistic view on the opportunities and pitfalls of developing a citizen-oriented news recommendation system.
BIO:
Dr. Kristin Van Damme is senior researcher in journalism at Artevelde University of Applied Sciences (Research & Development Center Communication, Media and Design) and project lead of the News Barometer project, an investigation of youth’s (12-26y) relation with news and disinformation. Additionally, she is lecturer Journalism at Communication Sciences at Ghent University. She obtained a PhD in journalism studies by studying news use in the transforming news environment.

MediaFutures Seminar: Automated Fact-checking: the scope of the problem in the state-of-the-art. Postdoc Fellow Ghazaal Sheikhi.
2022-01-14 11:00 - 12:00
Ghazaal Sheikhi, Postdoc Fellow from MediaFutures, University of Bergen, Norway will give a seminar on 14 January, at 11:00.
TITLE: Automated Fact-checking: the scope of the problem in the state-of-the-artWHEN: Friday 14 January, 11:00-12:00WHERE: Zoom https://uib.zoom.us/j/68310482035?pwd=[REDACTED] ID: 683 1048 2035Password: [REDACTED]
ABSTRACT:
Fact-checking in technical terms is the process of analyzing textual content for claim veracity detection. To mitigate the time and the human burden of fact-checking and to allow for more fact-checked articles, the use of ML and NLP to automate the fact-checking procedure has attracted notable interest in the recent decade. Automated fact-checking can be decomposed into three major sub-tasks including claim detection, evidence retrieval/ranking, and claim verification. Factual verification is the term used to refer to evidence retrieval and verification, integrated into a single task. Stance detection has also been considered as a distinct component of the pipeline, but it is basically part of the verification procedure. Another integrant of the verification sometimes addressed as a separate task is justification/explanation generation. The proposed solutions either result in end-to-end fact-checking systems or tackle certain tasks in the pipeline. This seminar covers the scope of the automated fact-checking problem in recent literature focusing on several approaches based on traditional machine learning techniques, deep learning models, information retrieval systems, and knowledge graphs.
BIO:
Ghazaal Sheikhi is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Norway. Her research interests revolve around machine learning, natural language processing and content analysis. Ghazaal investigates (semi) automated methods and tools to support fact-checking in newsrooms. In MediaFutures, she studies AI systems, NLP models and, ML methods to support fact-checking in newsrooms, particularly aiming at enhancing claim detection, verification, and justification.
Before, Ghazaal was an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Engineering, Final International University, North Cyprus. She holds a PhD in Computer Engineering (Machine Learning) from Eastern Mediterranean University, North Cyprus and a master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.

MediaFutures Seminar: Modeling News Flows: How Feedback Loops Influence Citizens' Beliefs and Shape Societies. Assoc. Prof. Damian Trilling.
2021-12-02 12:00 - 13:00
Damian Trilling, Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, will give a seminar on 2 December, at 12:00.
TITLE: Modeling News Flows: How FeedbackLoops Influence Citizens’ Beliefs and Shape SocietiesWHEN: Thursday 2 December, 12:00-13:00WHERE: Zoom : https://uib.zoom.us/j/62205578637?pwd=[REDACTED] ID: 622 0557 8637Password: [REDACTED]
ABSTRACT:
In both public and scientific debates, many worry that the architecture of our current (online) media environment leads to so-called “echo chambers” or “filter bubbles”. In this talk, I will challenge these metaphors and argue that they distract us from a deeper understanding of the underlying, reinforcing processes. First, I will discuss the role of recommender systems and other algorithmic systems in news exposure and dissemination, and under which circumstances the feedback loops they produce can indeed have detrimental consequences for society. Second, I will discuss feedback loops as they occur between different outlets and domains. This results in the outline a research agenda. I will end on an optimistic note, though, and argue how a stronger role of communication science can help developing beneficial tools for our society.
BIO:
Damian Trilling is Associate Professor at the Department of Communicaton Science at the University of Amsterdam), where he is Co-Director of the Communication in the Digital Society Initiative and member of the program group Political Communication and Journalism. He is also one of the co-founders of the Computational Communication Science Amsterdam Lab. Next to general courses in political communication, he teaches intensively in the area of Computational Communication Science. His research focuses on the question how news spreads in today’s media landscape and how people follow the news. In particular, he is interested in reinforcing processes, such as the question in how far exposure and distribution re-inforce each other, and how the users and algorithms interact in such processes.

MediaFutures Seminar: Platform provenance analysis for digital images. Assistant Prof. Cecilia Pasquini.
2021-11-26 12:00 - 13:00 | Online
Cecilia Pasquini, Assistant Professor at the University of Trento, Italy, will give a seminar on 26 November, at 12:00.
TITLE: Platform provenance analysis for digital images.
WHEN: Friday 26 November, 12:00-13:00
WHERE: https://uib.zoom.us/j/61463829083?pwd=[REDACTED]

Meeting ID: 614 6382 9083
Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:

The forensic analysis of image and video data that have been shared through social networks entails significant technological challenges. In fact, during the (possibly multiple) uploading processes, sharing platforms typically apply on the data routine operations such as recompression and resizing, so to reduce memory and bandwidth requirements. While this implies a degradation of the visual information that hinders, for instance, the possibility to identify the acquisition device, it has been observed that the transition through different social media platforms leave distinctive patterns on the data.By characterising those patterns at both signal and metadata-level, information on previous sharing operations can be extracted, thus possibly enabling a backward reconstruction of the sharing path of the visual data under analysis. This talk will report recent evidences in this direction and opportunities for provenance analysis on shared digital images.

BIO:

Cecilia Pasquini received her PhD in 2016 from the University of Trento, Italy. From 2016 to 2020, she has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Privacy and Security Lab with the Universität Innsbruck, Austria, and at the IT Security Lab at the University of Münster, Germany. In 2013, she was visiting PhD student at the University of Vigo, Spain. Prior to that, she received a BS and MS degree in Mathematics from the University of Ferrara, Italy, in 2010 and 2012.Her research area lies at the intersection of multimedia signal processing and information security, with special focus on image and video forensics, multimedia security, adversarial signal processing and machine learning. She has participated in several projects on these topics, such as UNCHAINED (funded by DARPA), PREMIER (funded by MIUR), ITBDIF (funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), J-MDS, NOTIS, ECMSF (funded by EUREGIO). She has been General Co-Chair of the ACM Workshop on Information Hiding & Multimedia Security 2018, and co-organizer of the special session “Information Security meets Adversarial Examples” at IEEE WIFS 2019. She is member of the Technical Program Committee of several conferences and workshops (e.g., ACM IH&MMSec, IEEE WIFS, IEEE ICASSP, EUSIPCO), serves as reviewer for many journals (e.g., IEEE TIFS, IEEE TCSVT, IEEE TIP) and as Associate Editor for the EURASIP Journal on Information Security. She is an elected member of the EURASIP BForSec Technical Area Committee. She received the Top 10% paper award (IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing 2013) and the “F. Carassa” GTTI 2015 award for the best ongoing PhD.

MediaFutures Seminar: Translating Educational Data into Meaningful Practices: Insights from the field of Learning Analytics. Mohammad Khalil.
2021-11-25 12:00 - 13:00 | Online
Mohammad Khalil, senior researcher at UiB Centre for the Science of Learning & Technology (SLATE), will give a seminar on 25 November, at 12:00.
TITLE: Translating Educational Data into Meaningful Practices: Insights from the field of Learning AnalyticsWHEN: Thursday 25 November, 12:00-13:00WHERE: https://uib.zoom.us/j/63125529816?pwd=[REDACTED] ID: 631 2552 9816Password: [REDACTED]
ABSTRACT:
Since the last decade, higher education has moved online and institutions have had access to more student data than ever before. A proactive move before the recent pandemic where online and virtual learning environments had functioned as primarily digital repositories of educational resources, employing student data to improve learning experiences and environments was disseminated in 2011, so-called Learning Analytics. For 11 years, the emerging of Learning Analytics has evolved into a mature research field and practice.
In this talk, I will share with you some facts about the field in 4Ws, Where it originates from? What theories have influenced the field? How does it translate students’ data into useful practices (empirical evidence)? and What concerns have been raised through such usage?
BIO:Mohammad Khalil, PhD, is a senior researcher of Learning Analytics at the Centre for the Science of Learning & Technology (SLATE). His research interests focus on understanding online learning behavior based on students digital traces in virtual environments, including self-regulation. His other research interests include privacy and ethics, and visualizations. Khalil is the author of over 60 research papers in scholarly journals and international conferences in the area of Learning Analytics and Technology-Enhanced Learning.

CEDAS & MediaFutures Joint Seminar: Knowledge Graph: Exploring Reasoning and Learning with Jeff Z. Pan
2021-11-11 13:00 - 14:00 | Online
Please join the Center for Data Science (CEDAS, UiB) and MediaFutures for an invited talk by Dr. Jeff Z. Pan from the School of Informatics at The University of Edinburgh, about the topic of Knowledge Graphs.
TITLE: Knowledge Graph: Exploring Reasoning and LearningWHEN: 11 November, 13:00-14:00WHERE: https://uib.zoom.us/j/66264523995?pwd=[REDACTED]
Abstract: The topic of large scare knowledge representation and reasoning has been popular over the last two decades. It has gone through a few stages in recent years, including the Semantic Web, Linked Data and Knowledge Graph. Different stages come with different reasoning tasks; e.g., the Semantic Web stage favours ontological (schema) reasoning, while the Linked Data stage attracts data reasoning and query answering. In the Knowledge Graph stage, it seems that learning is regarded as a key reasoning task, at least as an approximate reasoning task. In this talk, I will share some of my thoughts on learning and reasoning in the Knowledge Graph stage, from the perspective of approximate reasoning, and maybe more.
Speaker: Dr Jeff Z. Pan is a Reader on Knowledge Graphs at the School of Informatics at The University of Edinburgh. He co-chairs the Knowledge Graphs group at the Alan Turing Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Manchester. His research focuses primarily on knowledge representation and artificial intelligence, in particular on knowledge graph based learning and reasoning, and knowledge based natural language understanding and generations, as well as their applications. He was an official reviewer of the international Knowledge Graph standards RDF and SPARQL and was a key contributor of the international standard (OWL) of Knowledge Graph schemas. He led the development of the award-wining TrOWL approximate reasoner, which is one of the top three OWL 2 DL reasoners in the sound and complete Ontology Reasoner Evaluation (ORE2014). He was the Chief Scientist of the EU Marie-Curie K-Drive project. He is the Chief Editor of the first two books on Knowledge Graph. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Web Semantics (JWS) and of the International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS). He is a Programme Chair of the 19th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2020), the premier international forum for the Semantic Web and Knowledge Graph.
For more info from CEDAS, please visit: https://www.uib.no/cedas-norsk/147863/knowledge-graph-exploring-reasoning-and-learning

MediaFutures Seminar: Countering rumours in online social media: A comprehensive response with the focus on ML-based approaches, Amir Ebrahimi Fard
2021-10-28 12:00 - 13:00 | Online
Amir Ebrahimi Fard, Postdoctoral Researcher on Explainable AI at Maastricht University, will give a talk on Thursday 28 October, at 12:00.

TITLE: Countering rumours in online social media: A comprehensive response with the focus on ML-based approachesWHEN: Thursday 28 October 2021, 12:00-13:00WHERE: Zoom: https://uib.zoom.us/j/62501981715?pwd=[REDACTED] Meeting ID: 625 0198 1715Password: [REDACTED]
Abstract:
The phenomenon of rumour spreading refers to a collective process where people participate in the transmission of unverified and relevant information to make sense of ambiguous, dangerous, or threatening situations. The dissemination of rumours in certain subject domains such as healthcare, economics, and politics on a large scale no matter with what purpose could precipitate catastrophic repercussions. Thus it is of utmost importance to respond to this growing threat urgently and meticulously. There have been serious efforts by governments, platforms, news organisations, and academic institutions around the world to curb and control the dissemination of online rumours; however, the surge of unsubstantiated claims and conspiracy theories during the COVID time showed the power of this phenomenon once more.
Inspired by epidemiology, during this seminar, I will discuss a comprehensive and coordinated response to counter rumour spreading in social media. Besides, in this response, I will emphasise the role of machine learning-based models due to their scalability and point out one specific issue with current approaches to computational rumour detection.
Bio:
Amir Ebrahimi Fard is a postdoctoral researcher on Explainable AI at the Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering at Maastricht University. He received his PhD from TU Delft on the topic of rumour detection in online social media.

MediaFutures Seminar: Nordis - The Nordic Observatory for Digital Media and Information Disorder, Carl-Gustav Lindén
2021-10-15 12:00 - 13:00 | Online
Carl-Gustav Lindén, Associate Professor in Data Journalism at the University of Bergen, will give a talk to the MediaFutures community on 15 October at 12:00 about the new project titled “Nordis – The Nordic Observatory for Digital Media and Information Disorder”. The Nordis project is funded by the European Commission for a duration of two years, and is led by DATALAB at Aarhus University in Denmark. It’s a Nordic consortium, where the University of Bergen and Faktisk.no, are the Norwegian partners.
TITLE: Nordis – The Nordic Observatory for Digital Media and Information DisorderWHEN: Friday 15 October 2021, 12:00-13:00WHERE: https://uib.zoom.us/j/67891397775?pwd=[REDACTED] ID: 678 9139 7775Password: [REDACTED]
Abstract:
University of Bergen (UiB) is part of the EU funded project NORDIS – Nordic observatory for digital media and information disorders that was launched on September 1. The European Commission has announced the eight selected national hubs that will become part of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) network. The network of hubs on digital media will contribute to the fight against disinformation. NORDIS will be an independent Nordic regional hub with all national certified fact-checkers and a university in each of the four biggest Nordic countries Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark. The consortium will contribute to EDMO and the European infrastructure of combating disinformation and digital information disorder with a specific welfare state perspective. NORDIS is coordinated by Aarhus Universitet and UiB is responsible for Work Package 3 that will center around innovation and technology. In this WP the researchers at UiB will collaborate closely with fact-checkers and new technology companies as well as other EDMO hubs to analyse user needs and develop new tools for verification of content.
Bio:
Carl-Gustav Lindén is Associate Professor of Data Journalism at UiB and will be working with the NORDIS project during 2021-2023.

MediaFutures Annual Meeting
2021-09-29 12:00 - 2021-09-30 14:00
The program and link to register can be found here:
https://mediafutures.no/2021/08/27/program-for-mediafutures-annual-meeting-2021/
