MediaFutures

MediaFutures Seminar: Platform provenance analysis for digital images. Assistant Prof. Cecilia Pasquini.
2021-11-26 12:00 - 13:00 (Europe/Oslo) | 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/

Seminar: Natural Language Generation, Automated Journalism and Finding the Middle Road
2021-09-24 11:00 - 12:00 | Online
MediaFutures is pleased to announce that Leo Leppänen, who is a computer science doctoral student at the Discovery Research Group of University of Helsinki, Finland will be giving a seminar on the topic of natural language generation.
Welcome to all!
TITLE: Natural Language Generation, Automated Journalism and Finding the Middle Road
WHEN: Friday, 24 September 2021, at 11.00-12.00
WHERE: https://uib.zoom.us/j/63314203494?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 633 1420 3494
Password: [REDACTED]
After more than half a century of academic research, natural language generation has established a clear foothold in the newsroom. In this talk, I’ll discuss lessons learned from building multilingual natural language generation systems for several number-heavy news domains such as elections, national statistics, and COVID developments. We’ll discuss what I believe are the most significant relative downsides associated with commonly employed approaches, and what could be a “middle road” that might sidestep at least some of said downsides. This exploration is not limited to purely technical aspects, and we will also make short detours to some legal and ethical questions related to automated production of news texts.

Leo Leppänen is a computer science doctoral student at the Discovery Research Group of University of Helsinki, Finland. His research focus is on data-to-text natural language generation, more specifically on the automated generation of reports for purposes of news, analysis of historical news paper collections, teaching etc. In addition to approaching the topic from a computer science perspective, he is also interested in both ethical and legal questions related to use of AI in the newsroom.

Workshop on trust and distrust in news
2021-06-18 11:00 - 12:00 | Online
TIME: 18.06.21 kl. 11:00 – 12:00
PLACE: https://uib.zoom.us/j/65759547007?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 657 5954 7007
Password: [REDACTED]
PROGRAM:
10 min: Welcome and introduction
10 min: Irene Costera Meijer – How young people (18-34) and older people (45 +) differ in the way they deal with experiences of trust and distrust.
10 min: Erik Knudsen – Understanding trust in the media and its determinants.
30 min: Discussion – what role does news media trust play in MediaFutures?
Join Zoom Meeting (recommended)
https://uib.zoom.us/j/65759547007?pwd=[REDACTED]

Seminar: Exploring media experience: why is it important to media innovation? Irene Costera Meijer, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
2021-06-17 13:00 - 14:00 | Online
Irene Costera Meijer, Professor of Journalism Studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, (The Netherlands) and Professor II at the University of Bergen will talk about why we should regard audience experience as key to both innovation and quality.
TITLE: Exploring media experience: why is it important to media innovation?
WHEN: Thursday, 17 June 2021, 13:00-14:00
WHERE:https://uib.zoom.us/j/61527564041?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 615 2756 4041
Passcode: [REDACTED]
ABSTRACT: In today’s world, innovation appears to have replaced quality as the dominant concept in metajournalistic discourse. Innovation guards the distribution of financial resources – more investments in technology – and working conditions –more freelance journalists as a flexible workforce. Innovation also works as a distinctive mark of professional status and is at the center of antagonistic labor relations – e.g. the introduction of robot journalism.
The shift from quality discourse to innovation discourse involved a change in the journalistic perception of audiences: from being irrelevant (if not a negative concern) to being main targets.
Although the question of how to reach audiences seems to be still dominant, news organizations appear to become more open and sensitive towards finding out how to become valuable to audiences, how to open up their minds, how to broaden their horizon, and how to provide them with a quality experience that will enlighten them with reliable information considered worthwhile.
In this talk I will answer the question how innovation discourse and quality discourse may meet by focusing on what audiences experience as valuable journalism. I will demonstrate how it crystallized over the years into three key experiences: Learning something new, Getting recognition and Increasing mutual understanding.
BIO: Irene Costera Meijer is Professor of Journalism Studies and head of the Journalism Studies section at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is a world leading journalism and media scholar having recently set the agenda for the audience turn in journalism studies. Her research appeared in many journals and books and focuses on what news users value about journalism. She also works as a professor II at the Research group for Media Use and Audience Studies of the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at University of Bergen.
Her research interests focus on audience studies and in particular on the impact of digitalization on changing practices of media consumption, media experiences and news use. When doing research she often collaborates with media organisations. This makes it easier to translate scholarly results into relevant suggestions for every day professional practices and vice versa, understanding the fundamental dilemmas of professional practices and translating these into academic publications. Costera Meijer is also on the editorial board of the academic journals Digital Journalism and Journalism Practice.

Seminar: Computational Psychology in Recommender Systems, Marko Tkalčič, University of Primorska (Slovenia).
2021-06-08 11:00 - 12:00 | Online
MediaFutures is pleased to announce that Marko Tkalčič, who is an Associate Professor at University of Primorska (Slovenia) will be giving a seminar on the topic of computational psychology in recommender systems.
Welcome to all!
TITLE: Computational Psychology in Recommender Systems
WHEN: Tuesday, 8 June 2021, at 11:00-12:00
WHERE: https://uib.zoom.us/j/61489174500?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 614 8917 4500
Password: [REDACTED]
ABSTRACT: Recommender systems are systems that help users in decision-making situations where there is an abundance of choices. We can find them in our everyday lives, for example in online shops. State-of-the-art research in recommender systems has shown the benefits of behavioural modeling. Behavioural modeling means that we use past ratings, purchases, clicks etc. to model the user preferences. However, behavioural modeling is not able to capture certain aspects of the user preferences. In this talk I will show how the usage of complementary research in computational psychology, such as detection of personality and emotions, can benefit recommender systems.
BIO: Marko Tkalčič is associate professor at the Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies (FAMNIT) at the University of Primorska in Koper, Slovenia. He aims at improving personalized services (e.g. recommender systems) through the usage of psychological models in personalization algorithms. To achieve this, he uses diverse research methodologies, including data mining, machine learning, and user studies. He is editorial board member of the Springer UMUAI and Frontiers in Psychology journals and PC chair of the ACM UMAP 2021 conference.

Seminar: AI in the social sciences AND a taxonomy of fake news: Two research themes. Rich Ling, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
2021-06-03 13:00 - 14:00 | Online
Welcome to a seminar with Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology, Rich Ling, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, on Thursday, 3 June.
TITLE: AI in the social sciences AND a taxonomy of fake news: Two research themes.
WHEN: Thursday, 3 June 2021, 13:00-14:00
WHERE: https://uib.zoom.us/j/66200674584?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 662 0067 4584
Password: [REDACTED]
ABSTRACT: In this talk, Rich Ling will examine the role of AI in social science research. In addition, he will examine a taxonomy of fake news. In the case of AI in the social sciences, Ling will examine how this technology is emerging as a new tool that will eventually shape social science research in the coming years. When considering fake news, Ling will review how this phenomenon has been seen over the past decade and how researchers have approached it.
BIO: Rich Ling has been the Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore where he studies the social consequences of mobile communication. Ling has written The mobile connection (2004), New Tech, New Ties (2008) and Taken for grantedness (2012). He edits the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and a founding co-editor of both Mobile Media and Communication and the Oxford University Press Series, Studies in Mobile Communication. He is a member of Det Norske Vitenskaps Akademi (The Norwegian Academy of Arts and Letters), Academia Europaea, and a fellow of the International Communication Association.
Welcome to all!

Seminar: Should we have PETs in "smart" homes? Tomasz Kosinski, Chalmers University of Technology
2021-05-20 13:00 - 14:00 | Online
MediaFutures invites you to join us for a talk with PhD candidate Tomasz Kosinski, Chalmers University of Technology. The topic of his talk is privacy controls for the IoT systems we are surrounded by.
Welcome to all!
TITLE: Should we have PETs in “smart” homes?
WHEN: 20 May 2021, 13:00-14:00
WHERE: https://uib.zoom.us/j/66870039042?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 668 7003 9042
Password: [REDACTED]
ABSTRACT: This talk is not a lecture. The goal is to use plain English. Why? To simply convey some practical information and insights. About what? On Privacy Enhancing Technologies; PETs for short. What for? So that you can answer the question in the title for yourself. (Correct, I won’t do this one for you.) Why should you care to listen? Will it matter if you don’t? To whom? And what to use PETs for? Can it be applied to an Amazon Echo or Google Home? A “smart” lightbulb or your “smart” TV? All of them? These questions I’ll strive to answer. And I hope you will have more. Especially that in this popular science format, I will touch upon topics that should resonate with each of you and that are not limited to dark, dusty and narrow university corridors or Ivory towers. Tangible examples of this include reports of The Norwegian Consumer Council, Forbrukerrådet, regarding consumer-unfriendly practices. Similarly, recent NRK reports on location tracking through smartphone apps illustrate some issues that will be brought up in the talk.
BIO: The guy who will insist on not answering the question in the title is currently a pre-graduation PhD candidate. He’s based at Chalmers, a Swedish technical university located in Gothenburg. His core background is in Computer Science. The pre-PhD excursions involved software engineering, embedded systems, quadcopters, AI methods, human-robot and human-computer interaction. During the PhD time, he learned a bit about human studies (with mixed methods), scrutinizing smartphone apps (on Android) and analyzing the data showing what IoT devices tend to send over networks. Oh, and we didn’t bother asking about his off-work interests, since his PhD is on Privacy. You better follow him on social media for that.

Seminar: User-centered Investigation of Popularity Bias in Recommender Systems
2021-05-06 14:15 - 15:00 | Online
Please join the Center for Data Science (CEDAS, UiB) and MediaFutures for an invited talk by Himan Abdollahpouri from the Northwestern University, USA, about the topic of popularity bias in recommender systems.
Welcome to all!

TITLE: User-centered Investigation of Popularity Bias in Recommender Systems.
WHEN: 6 May 2021, 14:15-15:00
WHERE: https://uib.zoom.us/j/63657771765?pwd=[REDACTED]
ABSTRACT: Recommendation and ranking systems are known to suffer from popularity bias; the tendency of the algorithm to favor a few popular items while under-representing the majority of other items. Prior research has examined various approaches for mitigating popularity bias and enhancing the recommendation of long-tail, less popular, items. The effectiveness of these approaches is often assessed using different metrics to evaluate the extent to which over-concentration on popular items is reduced. However, not much attention has been given to the user-centered evaluation of this bias; how different users with different levels of interest towards popular items (e.g., niche vs blockbuster-focused users) are affected by such algorithms. In this talk, I first give an overview of the popularity bias problem in recommender systems. Then, I show the limitations of the existing metrics to evaluate popularity bias mitigation when we want to assess these algorithms from the users’ perspective and I propose a new metric that can address these limitations. In addition, I present an effective approach that mitigates popularity bias from the user-centered point of view. Finally, I investigate several state-of-the-art approaches proposed in recent years to mitigate popularity bias and evaluate their performances using the existing metrics and also from the users’ perspective. Using two publicly available datasets, I show that many of the existing popularity bias mitigation techniques ignore the users’ tolerance towards popular items. The proposed user-centered method, on the other hand, can tackle popularity bias effectively for different users while also improving the existing metrics.
BIO: Himan Abdollahpouri is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern University, USA. He received his Ph.D. in Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder under the supervision of Prof. Robin Burke. He was a pioneer in developing the multi-stakeholder recommendation research paradigm and has worked on the biases that might jeopardize the fairness of the recommendations across different stakeholders. In particular, he has done extensive work on the popularity bias in recommender systems and proposed several algorithms and evaluation metrics in this area. His work has appeared in top conferences such as RecSys, CIKM, UMAP, and journals such as UMUAI. He also has worked at Pandora Media and Spotify Research as a machine learning scientist.

Seminar: JECT.AI: Using digital technologies to augment work in the newsroom. Neil Maiden, City University of London
2021-05-04 12:15 - 13:00 | Online
Our invited speaker, Professor Neil Maiden, Professor of Digital Creativity, Cass Business School, City University of London, will give a talk about JECT.AI – a new digital product for augmented journalism. Maiden will also demonstrate a series of the tool’s features in the context of newsroom activities.
Welcome to all!
TITLE: JECT.AI: Using digital technologies to augment work in the newsroom.
WHEN: 4 May 2021, 12:15-13:00.
WHERE: https://uib.zoom.us/j/63279839902?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 632 7983 9902
Password: [REDACTED]
ABSTRACT: This seminar will introduce JECT.AI, a new digital product for newsrooms that has emerged from previous research and development work. The use of AI technologies in newsrooms remains contentious. Therefore, the JECT.AI developers worked closely with journalists to design a product that augments the existing capabilities of journalists, and ensures that journalists direct the product’s use. The seminar will demonstrate a series of JECT.AI features in the context of newsroom activities, to reveal how the product augments rather than inhibit how journalists work, and can enable newsrooms to operate more effectively.
BIO: Neil Maiden is Professor of Digital Creativity at the Business School (formerly Cass) at City, University of London, and Director of the National Centre for Creativity enabled by AI funded by Research England. He is also Chief Product Officer at JECT.AI Limited. His current research interests include uses of artificial intelligence to augment human creativity and enhancing design methods and tools to generate more creative solutions. He is and has been a principal and co-investigator on numerous EPSRC- and EU-funded research projects with a total value of over €73 million. He has published over 220 peer-reviewed papers in academic journals, conferences and workshops proceedings. He was Program Chair for the 12th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering in Kyoto in 2004, and Editor of the IEEE Software’s Requirements column from 2005-2013. His details are available at https://www.city.ac.uk/people/academics/neil-maiden.

Seminar: DeepFact: Deep Learning for Automated Fact Checking. Vinay Setty, University of Stavanger
2021-04-22 12:00 - 13:00 | 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!
