MediaFutures

Seminar: DeepFact: Deep Learning for Automated Fact Checking. Vinay Setty, University of Stavanger
2021-04-22 12:00 - 13:00 (Europe/Oslo) | Online
Associate Professor Vinay Setty from the University of Stavanger will hold a seminar summarizing the latest updates in the topic of automated fact checking. The video recording is available below.
Welcome to all!
TITLE: Deep Learning for Automated Fact Checking.
WHEN: 22 April 2021, 12:00-13:00.

ABSTRACT: The interest around automated fact-checking has increased as misinformation has become a major problem online. A typical pipeline for an automated fact-checking system consists of four steps: (1) detecting check-worthy claims, (2) retrieving relevant documents, (3) selecting most relevant snippets for the claim and (4) predicting the veracity of the claim. In this talk, I will talk about the use of state-of-the-art deep neural networks such as LSTMs and Transformer architectures for these steps. Specifically, how deep hierarchical attention networks can be used for predicting the veracity of the claims and how to use the attention weights to extract the evidence for the claims. In addition, I will also talk about how to do check-worthy claim detection using Transformer models. Using several benchmarks from political debates and manual fact checking websites such as Politifact and Snopes, we show that these models outperform strong baselines. I will also summarize the state-of-the-art research within the areas of automated fact-checking and conclude with a set of challenges and problems remaining in this area.
BIO: Dr. Vinay Setty is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Before that he has been an Assistant Professor at Aalborg University in Denmark and Postdoctoral Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Informatics. Setty got is PhD from University of Oslo, Norway.
Dr. Setty’s recent research areas mainly include information retrieval, text and graph mining using machine learning techniques. Text mining includes dealing with unstructured text, specifically news documents for tasks such as fake news detection, news ranking, news recommendation etc. Graph mining involves training network embeddings for machine learning on graphs and knowledge graphs. He has over 30 publications including several publications in highly competitive conferences in the area of data mining and Information Retrieval TheWebConf, SIGIR, VLDB, CIKM and WSDM.

Seminar: Reflections of Ourselves - Mobile Psychological Assessment with Smartphones. Clemens Stachl, Stanford University
2021-04-20 14:00 - 15:00 | Online
MediaFutures is pleased to announce a seminar with Clemens Stachl from Stanford University. The video recording is available below.
Welcome to all!
TITLE: Reflections of Ourselves – Mobile Psychological Assessment with Smartphones.
WHEN: 20 April 2021, 14:00-15:00.

ABSTRACT: The increasing digitization of our society radically changes how we use digital media, exchange information, and make decisions. This development also changes how social scientists collect data on human behavior and experience in the field. One new form of data comes from in-vivo high-frequency mobile sensing via smartphones. Mobile sensing allows for the investigation of formerly intangible psychological constructs with objective data. In particular mobile sensing enables fine-grained, longitudinal data collections in the wild and at large scale. The additional combination of mobile sensing with state of the art machine learning methods, provides a perspective for the direct prediction of psychological traits and behavioral outcomes from these data. In this talk I will give an overview on my work combining machine learning with mobile sensing and discuss the opportunities and limitations of this approach. Consequently, I will provide an outlook perspective on where the routine use of mobile psychological sensing could take research and society alike.
BIO: Clemens Stachl is a post-doctoral researcher specializing in research methodology, behavioral observation and individual differences. His research includes topics in psychology, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. He primarily uses digital recordings from consumer electronics together with computational modeling to investigate the connections between psychological characteristics, states, behavior and situational factors. Throughout his work he promotes open scientific practices.

Seminar: Are Filter Bubbles Real? Axel Bruns, QUT
2021-04-16 09:00 - 10:00 | Online
MediaFutures is pleased to announce a seminar with Axel Bruns from Queensland University of Technology (QUT). The video recording is available below.
Welcome to all!
TITLE: Are Filter Bubbles Real?
WHEN: 16 April 2021, 09:00-10:00.

ABSTRACT: The success of political movements that appear to be immune to any factual evidence that contradicts their claims – from the Brexiteers to the ‘alt-right’, neo-fascist groups supporting Donald Trump – has reinvigorated claims that social media spaces constitute so-called ‘filter bubbles’ or ‘echo chambers’. But while such claims may appear intuitively true to politicians and journalists – who have themselves been accused of living in filter bubbles –, the evidence that ordinary users experience their everyday social media environments as uniform and homophilous spaces is far more limited. For instance, a 2016 Pew Center study has shown that only 23% of U.S. users on Facebook and 17% on Twitter now say with confidence that most of their contacts’ views are similar to their own. 20% have changed their minds about a political or social issue because of interactions on social media. Similarly, large-scale studies of follower and interaction networks on social media show that such networks are often thoroughly interconnected and facilitate the flow of information across boundaries of personal ideology and interest, except for a few especially hardcore partisan communities. This talk explores the evidence for and against echo chambers and filter bubbles. It moves the present debate beyond a merely anecdotal footing, and offers a more reliable assessment of this purported threat.
BIO: Prof. Axel Bruns is a Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His books include Are Filter Bubbles Real? (2019) and Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), and the edited collections Digitizing Democracy (2019), the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), and Twitter and Society (2014). His current work focusses on the study of user participation in social media spaces such as Twitter, and its implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere, drawing especially on innovative new methods for analysing ‘big social data’. He served as President of the Association of Internet Researchers in 2017–19. His research blog is at https://snurb.info/, and he tweets at @snurb_dot_info.

Steering Board meeting
2021-03-25 13:00 - 15:00 | Online
MediaFutures’ first steering board will take place 25th of March from 12:00 to 14:00. This is an internal event that is scheduled online.

Seminar: Multimedia Verification, with Duc Tien Dang Nguyen, UiB
2021-03-11 13:00 - 14:00 | Online
MediaFutures is pleased to announce a seminar with Duc Tien Dang Nguyen from the University of Bergen.
Welcome to all!
TITLE: Multimedia Verification – An overview on technologies and services for the detection of multimedia-based disinformation in the era of deep networks.
WHEN: 11 March 2021, 12:00-13:00.
ABSTRACT: In this seminar, Duc Tien Dang Nguyen will give a broad overview of how researchers seek to advance methods that detect and reveal modified and manipulated images and videos, and building up trust in online media based on advanced multimedia verification algorithms. He will also give discussions on how AI can be used and misused in the era of deep networks.
These main topics will be discussed within the seminar:
– Image manipulation detection
– Deepfake generation and detection
– Social multimedia verification
– The limits of current forensic tools
BIO: Dr. Duc Tien Dang Nguyen is an Associate Professor of Information Science. His area of expertise is on multimedia forensics, lifelogging and multimedia retrieval. Duc Tien is the author and co-author of more than a hundred peer-reviewed research papers that have been cited over a thousand times. He has been PC member at a number of conferences, co-organizer of both the Multimedia Verification, the NTCIR Lifelog Task and the ImageClef Lifelog tasks, and co-organizer of over ten other MediaEval tasks. He is also to be the incoming General Chair of MMM 2023.

Opening of SFI MediaFutures
2021-02-02 15:00 - 16:30
We invite you to the digital opening of SFI MediaFutures – Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation, Tuesday 2nd of February 14.00-15.30 CET.
Together with 13 other R&D partners from the media and tech industry and the academic world we are creating the first research centre in Norway developing responsible media technology, and everybody is welcome to the digital opening of the centre.
The centre’s main goal is to generate innovation and value creation for the Norwegian news media and media technology industry through long-term research on responsible media technologies, and we focus on advanced new media technology for responsible and effective media user engagement, media content production & analysis, media content interaction and accessibility. MediaFutures will also research new methods and metrics for precise audience understanding, for example AI technology to reveal fake news or filter bubbles.

Streaming
The event is broadcasted via https://vimeo.com/event/605507
Programme

1400
Welcome
by Centre Director Christoph Trattner

1405
Opening remarks
Henrik Asheim, Norwegian Minister for Research and Higher Education
University of Bergen by Rector Margareth Hagen
Department of information science and media studies by Head of department Leif Ove Larsen
Research Council of Norway

1415
Video greetings from research partners
University of Oslo
NORCE
University of Stavanger

1420
Panel conversation
Moderator: Christoph Trattner, Centre Director, MediaFutures, UiB
In the panel:

Ingrid Agasøster, Chief Operating Officer, Fonn Group
Eirik Solheim, NRK Norwegian Broadcasting Cooperation
Christian Birkeland, Digital director/director TV2 Sumo, TV2

1440
Keynote: Sinan Aral
Sinan Aral is a Global Authority on Business Analytics; Award-winning Researcher; Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist; Director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and Social Analytics Lab and a founding partner at Manifest Capital. He is a managerial economist and econometrician by training whose expertise spans social networks, causal inference, the design and analysis of large-scale digital experiments, machine learning, predictive modeling, natural language processing, AI, big data, marketing, IT, social commerce, ecommerce, behavior change and economic productivity. He earned his PhD at MIT and completed his Master’s degrees at the London School of Economics and at Harvard.

1500
Video greetings from industry partners
Amedia
Bergens Tidende
Fonn
Highsoft
IBM
NRK
Schibsted
TV2
Vimond
Vizrt

1505
Keynote: Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Bias on Search and Recommender Systems
In this presentation we cover all biases that affect search and recommender systems. They include biases on the data, the algorithms as well as the user interaction, in particular the ones related to relevance feedback loops (e.g., ranking and personalization). In each case we cover the main concepts and when known, the techniques to ameliorate them, as well as biases that might be product of the evaluation methods used. This presentation is partially based on Bias on the Web, Communications of ACM, June 2018. Ricardo Baeza-Yates is currently Director of Graduate Data Science Programs (part-time) of Northeastern University, Silicon Valley campus, since January 2018. Between 2016 and 2020 he was CTO of NTENT, a search technology company based in California. Previously, he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs. He is part-time professor at the University of Chile and Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, and an adjunct professor at the CS department of the University of Waterloo, Canada. His research interests includes algorithms and data structures, information retrieval, web search and data mining, and data science and visualization. He is ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow.

1525
End remark
by Centre Director Christoph Trattner

Welcome!
