MediaFutures

Bergen-Boston Forum
2023-11-30 09:15 - 2023-12-01 17:00 (Europe/Oslo) | Philosophy Department of the University of Bergen, Norway
We are happy to invite to a two-day hybrid workshop about AI and the Future of Protest Politics: Politics and Emotions in the Age of Digital Transformation and Surveillance Capitalism.
Our goal is to bring together prominent scholars from different disciplines to discuss the impact of AI-based platforms, and their underlying technological and economic principles, on political discourse and protest.
The event will draw on the Boston-Bergen Forum on Digital Futures—an international research network among the ‘Culture, Society & Politics’ and the ‘Practical Philosophy’ research groups at UiB’s Philosophy Department, the Applied Ethics Center at UMass Boston, and the MIT Program Human Rights and Technology.
MediaFutures center director Christoph Tratter is co-leading the project together with Professor Franz Knappik (Bergen), Dr. Christopher Senf (Bergen) and Professor Nir Eisikovist (UMass).

WHERE: The Philosophy Department in Bergen, Sydnesplassen 12/13, seminarrommet i 1. etasje
As it is a hybrid event, you can join the event in person or via zoom.
Register here

1st Workshop Day, Thursday, November 30th

09.15 am
Welcome Note

Section I: Making AI Intelligible

09.30 am
Keynote by Herman Cappelen (Hong Kong, online):“AI and The Commodification of Meaning”

10.15 am
Q&A (Moderation, Jesse Tomalty)

11.00 am
Rosalie Waelen (Bonn):“The Struggle for Recognition and AI’s Impact on Self-development”

11.30 am
Q&A (Moderation, Chris Senf)

12.30 am
Lunch break at Café Christie

Section II: Contesting the Attention Economy

13.45 pm
Sebastian Watzl (Oslo):“What is Wrong with How Attention is Commodified?”

14.30 pm
James Williams: “tba”

15.00 pm
Q&A (Moderation, Alec Stubbs)

Section III: Algorithms of (In)justice

15.45 pm
Kjetil Rommetveit (Bergen):“(How) Can you code rights and morality into digital infrastructures and AIs?”

16.15 pm
Alec Stubbs (UMass, Boston):“Generative AI and the future of Work”

16:45 pm
Q&A (Moderation, Carlota Salvador Megias)

17.30 pm
End

2nd Workshop Day, Friday, December 1st

10.00 am
Welcome Note

Section I: Political Technologies

10.15 am
Eugenia Stamboliev (Vienna):“Protesting the Classification of Emotions (affects) and its Technological means”

10.45 am
James Hughes (UMass, Boston):“Communication Technologies: Hegemonic, Radicalizing and Democratic”

11.15 am
Q&A (Moderation, Alec Stubbs)

12.15 am
Lunch break at Café Christie

Section II: Future of Protest Movements

13:30 pm
Paul Raekstad (Amsterdam):“Domination Without Dominators: The Impersonal Causes of Oppression”

14:00 pm
Christopher Senf (Bergen):“Algorithmic Exploitation of Recognition”

14.30 pm
Q&A (Moderation, Ane Engelstad)

15.15 pm
Coffee break

Section III Activism and Philosophy in the Age of AI

15.30 pm
Maria Brincker (UMass Boston, online):“What kind of space is a ‘platform’ with its own goals?”

16.00 pm
Kade Crockford (ACLU Massachusetts & MIT Media Lab, online):“All Politics is Local: Fighting Face Surveillance from the Ground Up in Massachusetts”

16.30 pm
Q&A (Moderation, Chris Senf)

17:30 pm
End

Abstracts:
1) Herman Wright Cappelen (Hong Kong)
“AI and the Commodification of Meaning”
AI systems, owned by private corporations, will soon have the ability to control the meaning of the sentences we speak and interpret. This can be seen as a form of commodification of speech act content, a more serious form of commodification than e.g., artistic commodification. The determination of meaning by AI raises concerns about corporate control over language, reminiscent of Orwellian scenarios. Often, the goals behind these communicative exchanges will be foreign to individuals, who may not endorse or even be aware of them. The result is a form of meaning alienation.
2) Rosalie Waelen (Bonn)
“The struggle for recognition and AI’s impact on self-development”
Critical theories, with their focus on power dynamics and emancipation, offer a valuable basis for the analysis of AI’s social and political impact. Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition is one such critical theory. Honneth’s theory of recognition adds to the present AI ethics debate, because it shines light on the different ways in which AI reinforces or exacerbates struggles for recognition. Moreover, through the lens of Honneth’s theory of recognition, one learns how AI can harm people’s self-development. This presentation highlights some of those contemporary struggles for recognition and their (potential) impact on people´s self-development.
3) Sebastian Watzl (UiO Oslo)
“What is Wrong with How Attention is Commodified?”
Our attention is commodified: it is bought and sold in market transactions when individuals lend out the ability to control their attentional capacities in exchange (for example) for technological services. What is wrong with that? Attention markets, we argue, resemble labor markets. By drawing on the ethics of commodification and core features of attention, we show that attention markets, while not always morally wrong, carry special moral risks: because of how attention shapes beliefs and desires, subjective experience and action, they are prone to be disrespectful, alienating, and provide fertile grounds for domination. Our analysis calls for regulatory interventions.
4) James Williams
tba
5) Kjetil Rommetveit (UiB Bergen)
“(How) Can you code rights and morality into digital infrastructures and AIs?”
In 1980 philosopher of technology Langdon Winner famously asked ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ This question was followed up by Latour’s (1994) and Verbeek’s (2008) analyses of technological mediation of morality. Whereas these questions were once provocative, in recent AI regulations they have become part of official governance mechanisms. In this talk I present some novel approaches to governance in the EU through, specifically the risk-based approach and the design-based approach. Situating these within a wider techno-regulatory imaginary, I provide examples of how these instruments play out in practice. I end on some critical questions: what kind of politics do in-built morality have? And what implications can be discerned for critical publics?
6) Alec Stubbs (UMass Boston)
“Generative AI and the Future of Work”
This talk intertwines André Gorz’s post-work philosophy with Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory to envision a democratized future in which generative AI serves the productive aims of society. The talk evaluates the pitfalls of generative AI in reshaping labor, including the likelihood of technological unemployment, downward pressure on wages, and deskilling of workers. The discussion also evaluates the potential of generative AI in reshaping labor, emphasizing the need for a demand for the reduction of the workweek in leftist politics and labor struggles. Central to the argument is Gorz’s imperative to redefine work’s role in a technologically advanced, equitable society.
7) Eugenia Stamboliev (Vienna)
“Protesting the classification of emotions (affects) and its technological means”
To critique affect technology, we need to politicize emotionality and affectivity newly. Today, we are witnessing the emergence of intrusive algorithmic technologies, such as AI, in our daily lives. These technologies, designed to measure and control lives, information, and data, are intended to nudge and influence our political moods and public sentiments as much as they are to measure expressions and emotions. In this talk, I will discuss the history of two types of “affect technologies” (AT) and offer some criticism on their goals and applications. First, ATs intended to measure and classify emotions and affection emerged from the cognitive turn in computer studies. While popular, these ATs are normatively problematic and flawed, but still influence the design and economic models underlying many recognition systems. Second, ATs expected to drive, manage, and influence political beliefs and public moods are underlining architectures that do more than manage emotions via technological means, but they are part of the devaluation of emotions through political campaigning. Protesting the shortcomings of ATs, means calling into question both the normative and political agendas underlying affect technologies, as well as offering new and positive approaches on affectivity that are beyond the scope of measurement and control, but remain politically crucial for democratic protest while avoiding commercial and technical exploitation.
8) James J. Hughes (UMass Boston & IEET)
“Communication Technologies: Hegemonic, Radicalizing and Democratic”
Books, radio and television all transformed political mobilization, by both elites and radicals. How different is the Internet, social media and algorithmically driven communication? Are we more likely to form radical sub-communities, each with its own reality (e.g. MAGA)? Can we envision democratic countervailing institutions emerging from the “commodification, outrageification, and gamification of protest” by platform companies? Will the algorithmic rules and required moderation included in the EU AI Act, DMA and DSA reduce ideological hegemony, improve collaboration and decrease toxicity in these environments?
9) Paul Raekstad (Amsterdam)
“Domination Without Dominators: The Impersonal Causes of Oppression”
Social movements of the last centuries have been naming and analyzing the complex forms of personal and impersonal domination that they fight to overcome. Yet current theories of domination have largely been unable to make sense of the latter. Theories of domination as being subject to the will, or arbitrary power, of another rule them out, while extant theories of impersonal domination are often unsystematic or narrowly focused. My paper tries to remedy this by developing a systematic theory of impersonal domination, distinguish some important types thereof, and show why it matters for universal human emancipation.
10) Christopher Senf (UiB Bergen)
“Algorithmic Exploitation of Recognition”
tba
11) Maria Brincker (UMass Boston)
“What kind of space is a ‘platform’ with its own goals?”
How are we to understand our political actions on surveillance and algorithm-driven for-profit platforms? Current social media platforms present users with possibilities of building vast networks and achieving massive, fast reach to highly dispersed groups. Hence, they present incredible opportunities for expanded agency, organizing, and information sharing. However, these platform ecosystems also present users with highly unusual affordance spaces, which might pose challenges to our agency. Proprietary algorithms, vast data harvesting and camouflaged behavior modification tools are used to drive platform company interests – often conflicting with those of users. We engage in political movements to shape the future, but how do our actions on these platforms in fact shape our future and our extra-situational spaces?
12) Kade Crockford (ACLU & MIT)
“All Politics is Local: Fighting Face Surveillance from the Ground Up in Massachusetts”
In 2019, the ACLU of Massachusetts launched a campaign to bring democratic control over government use of facial surveillance technology. Over the following two years, we passed eight bans on government use of face surveillance in cities and towns across the state, including in Massachusetts’ four largest cities: Boston, Cambridge, Springfield, and Worcester. We also passed a state law creating some regulations on police use of the technology statewide. During this talk, campaign leader Kade Crockford will discuss how the ACLU’s campaigners dreamed big, built a coalition, and fought from the ground up to defeat the narrative of technological determinism, and how you can do it, too.

PhD halfway presentation by Peter Daniel Andrews
2023-11-28 10:00 - 12:00 | Nygårdsgaten 5, Nordre Allmenning 3 at Læringsarenaen
On November 28th, MediaFutures PhD candidate Peter Daniel Andrews will hold a midway presentation on his work. Anyone can drop by to listen and ask questions.
Abstract
Young adults rank among the least engaged consumers of digital news media. Generation Z predominantly engages with news through social media platforms, significantly altering traditional news consumption patterns. While viewing video content, Generation Z often simultaneously engages with social media and online resources, redefining traditional viewing paradigms. Cross-device multitasking primarily facilitates the search for relevant information across multiple platforms, thereby enhancing media contextualization. Simultaneously, it leverages social media to transform individual experiences into collaborative endeavors. This project aims to encapsulate the cross-device experience into a single platform where young adults can interact with video content to explore information, improving their understanding and accessibility of digital news media. Integrating an interactive platform atop video content provides a more immersive and engaging experience. However, to make video interactive, it is first necessary to extract contextual information so users can easily interact with content. Recent advances in Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have allowed for more sophisticated video content analysis. Using Object Detection and Multi-Object Tracking (MOT), contextual data is drawn from the video content and linked to relevant identities. By linking these identities to an external dataset resource, information regarding and surrounding content within the video becomes accessible for the user to assist in exploring digital news media. The user then has the freedom to explore and access information relevant to their understanding and experience. A dynamic interactive layer provides the necessary interface for users to engage directly with content extracted from the CV and AI backend. Utilizing Multimodal Conversational Agents (MCAs), users can interact seamlessly with the video content through natural language input while receiving feedback through multiple sensory modalities. The project uses quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the framework’s usability. The analysis aims to evaluate the feasibility of implementing such systems to assist young adults in comprehending news media video content. It also seeks to enhance user engagement and immersion, justifying its continued and future application. This research aims to revolutionize how young adults interact with and comprehend news media by offering an interactive layer that facilitates a deeper understanding and engagement with content topics, unlike traditional methods. By leveraging MCAs, the project enhances comprehension and introduces a fun and immersive element to digital news consumption, transforming it into an engaging and interactive experience. This approach counters the current trends of low engagement among young adults, presenting a new paradigm for how they interact with and understand news media.

CuttingEdge AI: What do we do with one billion for artificial intelligence?
2023-11-24 10:00 - 14:00
UiB AI, in collaboration with NORA, is excited to announce the Cutting Edge AI seminar taking place in Bergen on November 24th at the University Aula. Media Futures, a part of this collaboration, invites you to join us for an engaging discussion on the effective allocation of the government-promised AI billion. What is the actual purpose of having one billion for artificial intelligence?
The government presented an ambitious national initiative in September, focusing on research in artificial intelligence and digital security. The Prime Minister pledged a minimum investment of one billion Norwegian kroner over the next five years. Since then, there has been a heated debate among various academic communities regarding the direction of this initiative. Should the emphasis be on developing AI technology, or is it more crucial to research its applications and consequences? Is the debate merely a positioning of different academic communities seeking funding, or is there a genuine disagreement about the future of artificial intelligence research?
We hereby invite you to a debate where we delve into how we should utilize the AI billion. We are bringing together representatives from the government, administration, research communities, and business sectors to gain diverse perspectives on the path forward in Norway’s major investment in artificial intelligence.
UiB AI
Four times a year, UiB AI organizes seminars that shed light on various aspects of artificial intelligence. The seminar series serves as a meeting point for UiB employees and students interested in topics related to artificial intelligence. Participation is free, and the event is open to all interested individuals.
UiB AI is an initiative aimed at coordinating and showcasing all research, education, and innovation activities related to artificial intelligence at the University of Bergen. It facilitates collaboration and connections between faculties and external partners outside UiB.
NORA
Cutting Edge AI” is NORA’s seminar series where they explore the latest developments in artificial intelligence through hybrid seminars.
NORA, the Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Research Consortium, is a Norwegian collaboration between eight universities, three colleges, and four research institutes focused on AI, machine learning, and robotics. NORA operates a national research school, an industrial network, and provides support to startup companies. It has established itself as a national authority, consulted on matters of national importance.

MediaFutures Annual Meeting 2023
2023-11-16 - 2023-11-17
MediaFutures is a centre for research-based innovation with the goal to develop responsible media technology, leveraging AI technology, for the media sector.
The centre is a consortium of the most important media players in Norway. The University of Bergen is the host of the centre. User partners include NRK and TV 2, the two main TV broadcasters in Norway, Schibsted, including Bergens Tidende (BT), and Amedia, the two largest news media houses in Scandinavia/Norway, as well as the world-renowned Norwegian media tech companies Vizrt, Highsoft and the global tech and media player IBM. The centre collaborates with renowned national research institutions including the University of Oslo, the University of Stavanger and NORCE, and works together with high-profile international research institutions.
This years Media Futures Annual Meeting will be held at November 16-17 at Media City Bergen, Norway, the 2023 Annual Meeting constitutes a forum for the exchange of scientific results and industry insights within the field of responsible media technology.
This year’s focus topic are Generative AI and the EU AI Act. In particular, we are interested in tackling questions related to as to what extent Generative AI and the EU AI Act will have an impact on the future of the media.
Following last year’s success, the 2023 Annual Meeting is expected once again to attract, and bring together Norwegian and international researchers, and industry practitioners with the intent of engaging in discussions on topics related to:

AI Policy & Media Experiences
AI Policy & Recommender Technology
Generative AI & Content Production
Generative AI & Media Interaction
Generative AI & Large Language Models

Join us for inspirational keynote talks, prototype demonstrations, presentations held by our researchers, and industry partners, and poster session.
We are pleased to announce the following high-profile keynote speakers and experts in the field of AI: Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Esther Paniagua.

Registration closed.For late registrations please emailoffice@mediafutures.no

DIRECTIONS

Day 1
The venue for Day 1 is the Atlantis Auditorium at the Conference Centre at Media City Bergen.
Media City Bergen is in downtown Bergen, close to the main bus terminal.The closest public transport stop is “Nygård” where you can take the “bybanen” light rail, or buses 12 or 13.
You will find the registration desk in the Atrium once you enter Media City Bergen.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/GpZtDYshog3BhwWbA

Dinner
The Conference Dinner, for affiliates only, will be at 20:00 of Day 1, November 16th.It will be held at Kulturhuset I Bergen, Vaskerelven 8.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/XFQP4UCiYMq6aptx5

Day 2
Day 2 of the Annual Meeting, for affiliates only, will take place at Storm 2 at the Conference Centre at Scandic Ørnen.
Scandic Ørnen is located in Lars Hilles Gate 18, right next to the main bus terminal.The closest public transport stop is “Bergen Busstasjon”, the main bus terminal.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/oHBxMur84ReqdFVx7

PROGRAM

Day 1: Media City Bergen

AI Policy Workshop

09:00
Getting on the EU Policy Train.Charlotte Eide and Vivil Haraldsen

10:30
A Brief Primer on Global AI Policy.Nicholas Diakopoulos

11:00
Developing Mitigation Strategies to Counter Negative Impacts of Generative AI .Kimon Kieslich and Nicholas Diakopoulos

Opening Session

12:00
Registration

13:00
Welcome Adresse by Christoph Trattner, UiB Vice-Rector Pinar Heggernes, and, MCB CEO Helge O. Svela

Keynote Session

13:15
Keynote: Ricardo Baeza-YatesGenerative AI: The End of the Digital Truth?

14:00
Break

14:15
Keynote: Esther PaniaguaThrive or die? The future of journalism in the AI age

15:00
Break

15:15
Panel on Generative AI & AI PolicyAndreas Bengtsson, Ricardo Baeza-Yates,Esther Paniagua and Marija Slavkovik.Moderator: Nick Diakopoulos

Poster & Demo Session

16:00
Demo & Poster Exhibition

17:30
Demo & Poster Awards

20:00
Conference Dinner

Day 2 (Internal): Scandic Ørnen

Work Package Sessions

09:30
Info and announcements

09:35
WP1: Understanding Media Experiences

10:00
WP2: User Modeling, Personalisation & Engagement

10:20
WP3: Media Content Production & Analysis

10:45
Break + Group Photo

11:05
WP4: Media Content Interaction & Accessibility

11:25
WP5: Norwegian Language Technologies

12:00
Lunch

University – Industry Collaboration Session

13:00
University – Industry (UI) Collaboration Paper PresentationFlorence Jane Walker, UiB

13:20
University – Industry (UI) Collaboration Panel DiscussionFlorence Jane Walker, Enrico Motta,Irene Costera Meijer, Eivind ThrondsenModerator: Leif Ove Larsen

14:05
Break

World Café Session

14:25
Introduction to World Cafe

14:30
AI/UI/Policy World Cafe Session 1

14:50
AI/UI/Policy World Cafe Session 2

15:10
AI/UI/Policy World Cafe Session 3

15:25
Summary

16:00
End

AI POLICY WORKSHOP

From 9 to 12 on day 1 of the Annual Meeting, MediaFutures will host a AI Policy Workshop.
The workshop is divided into 3 sessions:

Getting on the EU Policy Train
9am-10:30am
Charlotte Eide and Vivil Haraldsen
Are you interested in knowing more about EU policy making and opportunities to give input?
At this workshop you will get an overview of EU decision making processes relevant for the Research & Innovation sector, see examples of how you can give your input to a specific policy area or to research and innovation priorities in EU programmes, and explore upcoming opportunities for giving policy input in your field.

A Brief Primer on Global AI Policy
10:30am-11am
Nicholas Diakopoulos
You could spend all day every day reading about new AI policy proposals. Regulatory initiatives are well underway in the EU, but things are also developing in China, the US, and via various global organizations. In this session we’ll cover some of the highlights so you have a better overview of what’s happening in the world of AI policy.

Developing Mitigation Strategies to Counter Negative Impacts of Generative AI
11am-12pm.
Kimon Kieslich and Nicholas Diakopoulos
What policies are actually going to work to reduce the negative impacts of generative AI in media and society? In this interactive session we’ll present scenarios and develop policy approaches that might actually work to reduce those impacts.

KEYNOTE SESSION

Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Director of Research, Institute for Experiential AI, Northeastern University
Ricaro Baeza-Yates is Director of Research at the Institute for Experiential AI of Northeastern University. Before, he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from 2006 to 2016. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retreival textbook published by Addison-Wesley in 1999 and 2011 (2nd ed), that won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. From 2002 to 2004 he was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society and between 2012 and 2016 was elected for the ACM Council. In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow, among other awards and distinctions. He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989, and his areas of expertise are web search and data mining, information retrieval, bias on AI, data science and algorithms in general.
We are honored to have Ricardo Baeza-Yates as a keynote speaker at our Annual Meeting.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Abstract
Generative AI: The End of the Digital Truth?
The Media of the future may be completely different from today’s, consisting of a mixture of truths and falsehoods. Determining what was generated by a chatbot and what was generated by a human being will be almost impossible. In fact, it will be difficult to know what data we can even use to continue improving the technology. Over time, it may learn from itself, becoming less and less human.

Esther Paniagua, Columnist and author specializing in science, technology, and cybersecurity.
Esther Paniagua is an award-winning tech & society journalist and author. Esther is one of Spain’s Linkedin Top Voices in Technology & Innovation. She has been honored as one of the “Top 100 Women Leaders of Spain” and as one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” by Forbes. Her outstanding contributions to science, technology, and innovation journalism have earned her numerous awards.
Her latest book, Error 404. Are you ready for a world without the internet? (Debate, 2021), has garnered critical acclaim. Originally published in Spanish, it has been translated into German (Hoffman und Campe) and into Italian (Einaudi). “Error 404” will also be available in Polish, Greek, Croatian, and Romanian soon.
Esther is highly sought after as a speaker on topics related to digital governance, tech ethics, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. Additionally, Esther teaches AI Journalism at the Rey Juan Carlos University’s master’s degree program in Investigative Journalism, New Narratives, Data, Fact-checking, and Transparency.
We are thrilled to have Esther Paniagua as a keynote speaker at our Annual Meeting.

Esther Paniagua

Abstract
Thrive or die? The future of journalism in the AI age
Gradually and then suddenly, AI has erupted into the media landscape. As we navigate this transformative era, pressing questions arise: Can AI fulfill its promises of enhancing work efficiency, boosting audience engagement, generating substantial economic gains, and liberating journalists from repetitive tasks? Or does it pose a threat to the very fabric of journalism, within the backdrop of precariousness and content plundering?This talk aims to unravel the complex web of AI’s -and more specifically LLM’s- impact on journalism, scaling automatic content generation and the proliferation of deepfakes in an already ‘infoxicated’ ecosystem. By exploring both utopian and dystopian scenarios, we seek to 1) provide insights into the potential futures that media and journalism face and 2) provide proposals, from an ethical and responsible media perspective, to ensure that Journalism thrives (and does not die) in the AI age.

Panel on Generative AI & AI Policy

Day 1 of the Annual meeting features a panel on Generative AI & AI Policy. Participants include our two keynote speakers, Ricardo Baeza-Yates as well as Esther Paniagua. They are joined by head of Schibsted Futures Lab, Andreas Bengtsson, as well as head of the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, Marija Slavkovik. The panel is moderated by Nicholas Diakopoulos.

POSTER & DEMO SESSION

We invited students from all areas of media studies, information sciences, informatics and other related fields to submit poster and demo abstracts for our Annual Meeting on 16-17 November.
The demo and poster session will take place on-site at the Media City Bergen Atrium. The presenters of the demos and posters will be given the opportunity to pitch their posters.

Name
Poster

Anastasiia Klimashevskaia
Evaluating The Effects of Calibrated Popularity Bias Mitigation: A Field Study

Ayoub Majjodi
How the user’s food knowledge and nudges effect the user experience?

Bilal Mahmood
Editorial Component in a News Recommender System

Huiling You
JSEEGraph: Joint Structured Event Extraction as Graph Parsing

Gloria Anne Babile Kasangu
Affective News Framing

Marianne Borchevink-Brækhus
What does it mean when people spend less time on news?

Peter Andrews
AiCommentator: A Multimodal Conversational Agent for Embedded Visualization in Football Viewing

Sohail Khan
Deepfake Detection: A Comparative Analysis

John Magnus Dahl
What if all your news were from…

Erik Knudsen
Nudge me towards a filter bubble!

Samia Touileb
Measuring Normative and Descriptive Biases in Language Models Using Census Data

Daniel Rosnes
Evaluating Feature-Specific Similarity Metrics using Human Judgments for Norwegian News

Florence Walker
I Dreamt of Something Lost

Vanessa Marie Haaland
Responsible Personalization of Advertisement on News Websites

Agnar haugbjørg Haugen
Exploring Political Engagement and Communication in Twitch Chat: A User-Centric Perspective

Andreas Solberg Jensen
Podcasts and platforms

Thomas Laag
Context-awareness in media recommendations

Snorre Alvsvåg
Personalized Playlists on TV 2 Play

In additon to the posters, 11 demos will be displayed showcasing recent work. The following researchers will present demos:

Anastasiia Klimanshevskaia
Ayoub Majjodi
Bilal Mahmood
Gloria Anne Babile Kasangu
Peter Andrews
Sohail Khan
John Magnus Dahl
Erik Knudsen
Daniel Rosnes
Samia Touileb
Huiling You

WP SESSIONS

WP Session Programme (Start of Day 2):

WP1: Understanding Media Experiences

09:35
WP1 OverviewBrita Ytre-Arne, UiB

09:40
Beyond «more time is better»: Understanding experiences of quick news use practicesMarianne Borchgrevink-Brækhus, UiB

09:50
What smartphones actually mean to teenagers – insights from an ethnographic studyJohn Magnus Dahl, UiB

WP2: User Modeling, Personalisation & Engagement

10:00
Responsible Personalization and Recommendation TechnologyMehdi Elahi, UiB

10:05
When sport get personalAstrid Tessem, TV2

10:10
Forget about Erna, here comes BERTThomas Husken, BT

10:15
Calibrated Popularity Bias Mitigation: Evaluating the Effects OnlineAnastasiia Klimashevskaia, UiB

WP3: Media Content Production & Analysis

10:20
Fact-Checking Complex ClaimsVinay Setty, UiS

10:35
The Need for Multimodal Verification: A Newsroom PerspectiveMorten Langfeldt Dahlback, Faktisk.no

10:45
Break + Group Photo

WP4: Media Content Interaction & Accessibility

11:05
Multimodal Conversational Agents for Embedded Visualization in Football ViewingMorten Fjeld, UiB

11:15
Dynamic Aspect Ratio for Live News at TV2Ingar Arntzen, NORCE

WP5: Norwegian Language Technologies

11:25
WP5 OverviewLilja Øvrelid, UiO

11:30
JSEEGraph: Joint Structured Event Extraction as Graph ParsingHuilin You, UiO

11:40
The EDEN dataset, and application of JSEEGraph to NorwegianLilja Øvrelid, UiO

11:50
Summarization benchmark for NorwegianSamia Touileb, UiB

UNIVERSITY – INDUSTRY COLLABORATION SESSION

Day 2 of the Annual Meeting features a Session on University – Industry Collaboration. Participants are Florence Jane Walker, Enrico Motta, and Irene Costera Meijer, who are currently working on a paper featuring aspects of collaboration between akademia and industry. The session starts with Florence Jane Walker presenting the findings of their study. Following the presentation the paper authors, Florence, as well as the co-authors Enrico Motta and Irene Costera Meijer is joined by Schibsted Academic Liason Eivind Throndsen in a panel. The panel is moderated by Leif Ove Larsen.

WORLD CAFÉ

At the end of day 2 we will be hosting a World Café on the conference topics:

Generative AI
AI Policy
Univeristy Industry Collaboration

There will be 3 sessions where participants will be seated at one of the topics for each of the sessions.
Table hosts:
Generative AI:

Nicholas Diakopoulos
Dietmar Jannach

U-I Collaboration:

Enrico Motta
Irene Costera Meijer

AI Policy

Kimon Kieslich
Oskar Juhlin

Fact Checking and Fact-based journalism in the age of AI
2023-11-01 09:00 - 16:00 | Kristiania, Kirkegata 24-26, Oslo, Kirkegata 24-26, Oslo, Norway
Kristiania University College and MediaFutures partner Faktisk.no have the honour to invite to a full-day conference about the challenges and opportunities that AI presents in the field of fact-checking.
How to distinguish between genuine and AI-generated content?
The challenges arising from new AI technology in fact-checking are significant. How is this field evolving, and what methods are being employed to uncover AI-generated visual content?
The event is free of charge and is aimed at journalists and editors in Norwegian media, representatives from Norwegian political parties, intelligence services, top executives, employees of humanitarian and human rights organizations, as well as researchers.
The event will be conducted in English. Please remember to register for the event.
Deadline to register: 25.10.2023
The conference will be also available via streaming.
Program
09.00: Doors open
09.30: Welcome & introduction by Morten L. Dahlback (Faktisk.no) and Nils Arne Bakke (Kristiania University College).
10.00: Presentation by Mevan Babakar, the News and Information Credibility Lead at Google.
10.45: 15 min break
11.00: Presentation by Andrew Dudfield, interim CEO of Full Fact, the UK’s largest independent fact-checking organization.
11.45: 60 min lunch break
12.45: Amnesty International’s AI-Generated Images: A Critical Assessment by Liv Hausken, professor and the head of the research for Media Aesthetics at the University of Oslo.
13.30: 15 min break
13.45: Multimodal Generative AI and Synthetic Media: Current Threats and Responses from a Global Human Rights and Civic Journalism Perspective by Sam Gregory, Executive Director of the independent fact-checking organization WITNESS.
14.30: 15 min break
14.45: Focus on the interaction between journalism and tech development by Pål Nedregotten, Director of Technology at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK).
15.30: Closing remarks
Small changes in the program may occur, potentially causing smaller moves of the time of the lunch break and the end.

Sampol Conference 2023: (Limited) Technology: Progress or Downfall of Democracy?
2023-10-18 08:30 - 15:30 | UiB Bergen, Norway
The Sampol Conference 2023 is organized by master’s degree students at the Department of Comparative Politics (UiB) every other year. Its main objective is to provide a vibrant platform for constructive dialogue and exchange of ideas on significant societal and scientific issues.
The conference has been held biennially since 1985, focusing on a wide range of topics, including the fight against terrorism, climate, and social sciences. Over time, the conference has established itself as a recognized platform for political science debate, fostering an interdisciplinary environment that brings together students, politicians, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and public administration.
This year’s Sampol Conference is set to take place on October 18th at Universitetsaulaen at UiB! During this year’s conference, we aim to explore the role of technology in society. The whole program can be found here.
The focus will be on how technology can be both the cause and the solution to many challenges affecting various aspects of society, including states, individuals, research, and businesses. Through debates, lectures, and panel discussions, we intend to shed light on a range of topics: ethics and regulation of artificial intelligence, research and user data from technology companies, the use of technology by authoritarian regimes, freedom of speech in the media, radicalization and political mobilization, as well as green sustainable development and innovation. The conference will also feature a traditional party debate on energy and renewable resources.
Big Sciene panel
MediaFutures researcher Samia Touileb will participate in the panel discussion on big data: Goldmine or Pitfall? scheduled from 11:15 to 12:00 on October 18th. This debate will raise questions about the role of independent research in modern times.
Tech giants like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon, possess vast amounts of user data, and it’s entirely up to them whether to share this data with researchers for social science purposes or not. This post sheds light on the ethical dilemmas that arise when corporations control who sees what, especially when the data they hold contains information about us, the ordinary citizens. What does the future research landscape look like? What can we learn from such data sources? Join us for a presentation from our experts, followed by an in-depth discussion on the opportunities, limitations, and ethics of “big data” in research.
Tickets for the day event can be purchased on the website of the conference. The tickets also include coffee and catering during the daytime part of the program.

Seminar on innovative human-computer interaction
2023-10-02 13:30 - 2023-10-03 16:30 | UiB Bergen, Norway
The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research group at the University of Bergen in cooperation with MediaFutures invites to a two-day seminar addressing innovative HCI.
Eight research and industry leader from Norway, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, and Japan will be holding presentations on topics such as medical sensing and human-workspace interaction.
The seminar will be rounded off with a panel discussion. No registration required.
We welcome all students, researchers, innovators, and industry representatives who are interested to participate in the seminar.
Speakers
Masahiro Takei, Chiba University, Japan
Laura Anna Garrison, Informatics, VisGroup, Univeristy of Bergen
Tor Gjøsæter, Ilder AS, Bergen, Norway
Mohammad Khalil, SLATE, UiB, Norway
Kazuyuki Fujita, Tohoku University, Japan
Where and When?

MONDAY 2nd October 2023Venue: Storsalen, Nygårdsgaten 5, UiB, Bergen

Room URL: https://www.uib.no/l%C3%A6ringsarenaen/162450/om-storsalen

The sessions are: 13:30 – 16:30: From Medical Sensing to Interactive Sensemaking
TUESDAY 3rd October 2023Venue: Auditorium 129 at Bjørn Christiansens house, Christies gate 12, UiB, Bergen (also shown in room 128)

Room URL: https://rom.app.uib.no/romInfo/q.php/206/129 and https://rom.app.uib.no/romInfo/q.php/206/128
The sessions are: 12:15 – 14:00: Smart Workspaces14:30 – 16:30: From Research to Innovation

More information can be found on uib.no

Irene Costera Meijer: TikTok as a case study to understand the layeredness of Media Experience:
2023-09-29 12:00 - 13:00 | MediaFutures, Media Futures HQ, 3rd floor, Bergen, 5008
Join our next Lunch Meeting with Irene Costera Meijer, Professor of Journalism Studies and head of the Journalism Studies section at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
She is also Work Package I Advisor and Key Researcher. 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.
Where and When?
At MediaFutures, 29.september at 12:00
Abstract:
TikTok reaches around 44% of the 18-24 age group, with 20% explicitly saying they use it for news (Newman et al., 2023). It is not surprising, then, that (news) media have migrated to TikTok to engage with younger audiences. Yet, research shows that media struggle with reaching young people, because conventional formats do not always correspond with how young people use and experience social media platforms. Nordic researchers have argued that newsrooms would benefit from a platform-specific content approach: beyond merely (re)”packaging” the news and neglecting the content, they must learn to “speak the code of TikTok” to engage young audiences with their news.
We took a different non-news centric approach by analyzing how 99 young people (16 – 24) experience TikTok and whether there might be room for news in this experience. Experience may highlight positionality, temporality, embodiment, ambivalence and interaction (Costera Meijer & Groot Kormelink, 2021; Ytre-Arne et al., 2023). This approach allowed us to get insight into the RELATIVE value of news within their TikTok-experiences.
In my presentation I will show how the dimension of temporality – the discrepancy between love = ‘concurrent enjoyment’ and hate = ‘retrospective regret’ may offer valuable insights for public service media and news media to stand out on TikTok and be meaningful to a young audience.

Knowledge Café on PhD Teaching Duties
2023-09-28 14:00 - 16:00 | MediaFutures, Media Futures HQ, 3rd floor, Bergen, 5008
As part of our Knowledge Café seminar series, MediaFutures will be organizing a seminar on teaching duties for PhD students at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies.
During the meeting you will be introduced to some of the tools available at the university, and that you might want to use during teaching. You will also get insights into what kind of teaching duties are required by the department, and what it means in terms of efforts and work hours.
Agenda
14:00 – 15:00: Marit Midtun and Kristoffer Eik, Læringslabben, will introduce Mitt UiB and other tools that can be used during teaching.
15:00 – 15:15: Break
15:15 – 15:45: Kine Lohne de Nijs and Knut Risnes, Department of Information Science and Media Studies, will give various important details about PhD’s teaching duties at the department.
15:45 – 16:00: Discussions

Liisa Ovaska: From permissive to resistive tactics: How audience members act, make sense and cope with audience-datafied journalism
2023-09-22 12:00 - 13:00 | MediaFutures, Media Futures HQ, 3rd floor, Bergen, 5008
We are pleased to invite to a seminar about Liisa Ovaska’s research paper on how audience members respond to audience-datafied journalism. Preliminary findings reveal a spectrum of strategies, ranging from resistance to acceptance, in how users engage with data-driven systems while consuming news.
Liisa Ovaska is a doctoral researcher at Tampere University. In her dissertation Ovaska studies the effects of audience metrics on audience members’ relations to digital journalism.
Where and When:
At MediaFutures, 22.september at 12:00
Abstract:

Although there exists a consensus of the fact that the usage of audience metrics has changed journalism, the audience’s perception to audience-datafied journalism has received less attention. In the newsrooms, metrics are used to collect data from audience and its behaviour, and further used to adjust the news outputs.
This talk will present Liisa Ovaska’s research paper, which examines how the audience members make sense, act and cope with audience-datafied journalism. Preliminary results suggest that the tactics varied from resistive to permissive: users tried either act against the datafied systems and minimise its impact to their news consumption or complied with the system by accepting it. The article is based on audience research conducted in the spring 2023. The data was produced by using group interviews and instant messaging group chats in which the participants reported of their encounters with datafied journalism for one week.

NORMalize at RecSys ’23
2023-09-19 09:00 - 17:35 | Online
MediaFutures Key Researcher Alain Starke is co-organizing a workshop on normative design and evaluation of recommender systems during the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, RecSys ’23.
NORMalize sets out to provide a platform for researchers and practicioners from different domains to discuss challenges related to the normative design and evaluation of recommender systems.
In this workshop they examine the question whether news recommenders should provide sufficiently diverse recommendations. Should we strive to expose users to content that contradicts their political beliefs?
It is RecSys’ first Workshop on Normative Design and Evaluation of Recommender Systems and will take place on Tuesday September 19, 2023. Remote participation is possible.
Agenda:
The morning is an on-site, while the afternoon offers a hybrid format.
Morning session
09:00 – 09:10 Welcome & Introduction
09:10 – 10:30 Interactive workshop
10:30 – 11:15 Coffee break
11:15 – 12:35 Interactive workshop
12:35 – 14:00 Lunch break

Afternoon session
14:00 – 14:45 Keynote: Louisa Bartolo
14:50 – 15:00 Towards a Pragmatic Approach for studying Normative Recommender Systems: exploring Power Dynamics in Digital Platform Markets
15:00 – 15:10 Designing and Implementing Socially Beneficial Recommender Systems: An Interdisciplinary Approach
15:10 – 15:20 Digital Humanism and Norms in Recommender Systems 15:20 – 16:05 Coffee break
16:05 – 16:15 Improving and Evaluating the Detection of Fragmentation in News Recommendations with the Clustering of News Story Chains
16:15 – 16:25 Enabling Serendipitous News Discovery Experiences by Designing for Navigable Surprise
16:25 – 16:35 NPR: a News Portal Recommendations dataset
16:35 – 16:45 Value-Based Nudging in News Recommender Systems – Results From an Experimental User Study
16:45 – 16:55 Refining deliberative standards for online political communication: Introducing a summative approach to designing deliberative recommender systems
16:55 – 17:05 Classification of Normative Recommender Systems
17:05 – 17:35 Panel discussion & Closing

BehavRec '23: Recommendations for Behavior Change
2023-09-19 09:00 - 10:30 | ACM RecSys, Singapore
Join us at the “BehavRec ’23: Recommendations for Behavior Change” workshop, a part of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys ’23) in Singapore from September 18th to 22nd, 2023.
This workshop focuses on persuasive and behavior change recommender systems, offering insights into designing recommendations that prompt positive behavior shifts. Explore a range of topics, including behavior change recommender systems in health, food, education, and more. Delve into user interfaces like visual, context-aware, and conversational interfaces. Discover innovative approaches such as controllability, transparency, and context-awareness in designing recommendations. Dive into the ethical and privacy aspects of behavior change technology and learn about theories of behavior change and persuasion. Explore evaluation methods and case studies. Submit your papers by August 3, 2023, through EasyChair. Join us to share, learn, and shape the future of behavior change technology.

Kunstig intelligens – ChatGPT: Hvor står vi – hvor går vi?
2023-09-14 18:00 - 20:00 | Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi, Drammensveien 78, Oslo, Norway
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters is hosting a panel debate with MediaFutures researcher Samia Touileb as one of the participants.
The title of the panel is Artificial Intelligence – ChatGPT: Where do we stand – where are we going? and will feature introductions by Samia Touileb as well as professor of legal informatics at the University of Oslo, Tobias Mahler.
The debate will be in Norwegian.
The debate will be streamed and shared at the youtube channel of The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Please visit the event website for more information.

NordMedia Conference 2023
2023-08-16 - 2023-08-18
NordMedia23 will be organized in Bergen, Norway from 16 – 18 August 2023. The theme of the conference is Technological Takeover? Social and Cultural implications – promises and pitfalls.
For more information visit: https://nordmedianetwork.org/nordmedia-conference-2023/

MediaFutures Seminar: Reaching New Audiences with Generative AI with Lydia Chilton, an Assistant Professor from Columbia University
2023-06-29 15:00 - 16:00
Lydia Chilton from Columbia University will give a seminar on June 29th

TITLE: Reaching New Audiences with Generative AI
WHEN: 29 June, 15:00 – 16:00
Presentation:
https://mediafutures.no/wp-content/uploads/Chilton_ReachingNewAudiences_June2023.pdf
ABSTRACT:
Writing a news article is a significant investment of time, energy, and intellect. For an article to have the impact it deserves, it needs to reach the right audiences. We demonstrate that generative AI tools can help journalists broaden their audience by transforming their content. Unlike previous technology, generative AI is flexible enough to modify the length, tone, message, and medium of content. But it needs human values and contextual understanding to guide it. We show how to turn articles into news illustrations for visual appeal on social media. We show how language models (like GPT 4) help find hooks to motivate topics so that they appeal to different audiences. And we show how to transform a traditional news article into TikTok-style reels. We then reflect on how generative AI can breathe new life into existing content through transformation, reuse, and retargeting information.

BIO:
Lydia Chilton is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. Her research is in computational design – how computation and AI can help people with design, innovation, and creative problem-solving. Applications include: creating media for journalism, developing technology for public libraries, improving risk communication during hurricanes, helping scientists explain their work, and improving mental health in marginalized communities. Dr. Chilton received her bachelor’s degree in computer science from MIT in 2007, her Masters in Engineering from MIT in 2009 and her PhD from the University of Washington in 2016. She was a post-doc at Stanford for 1 year before joining Columbia Engineering in 2017.

MediaFutures Seminar: Metrics for Measuring Normative Diversity in News Recommendations with Sanne Vrijenhoek from the University of Amsterdam
2023-06-16 12:00 - 13:00
Sanne Vrijenhoek from the University of Amsterdam will give a seminar on June 16th
TITLE: Metrics for Measuring Normative Diversity in News Recommendations
WHEN: 16 June, 12:00 – 13:00

ABSTRACT: News recommenders have the potential to fulfill a crucial role in a democratic society, directing news readers towards the information that is most important to them. However, while much attention has been given to optimizing user engagement and enticing users to click, much less research has been done on incorporating editorial values in news recommender systems. I will talk about our interdisciplinary work on defining normative diversity for news recommender systems, challenges for implementation, and the way forward.

BI: Sanne Vrijenhoek is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the AI, Media and Democracy Lab. Her work focuses on translating normative notions of diversity into quantifiable concepts that can be incorporated in news recommender system design.

Symposium - Towards a Fairer Future of Education: Algorithmic Inequality and Learning Analytics
2023-06-13
Where & When: Scandic Hotel Ørnen in Bergen, Wednesday June 13th.
Invitation: SLATE Research Centre and MediaFutures invite you to the symposium “Towards a Fairer Future of Education: Algorithmic Inequality and Learning Analytics”!
The emerging applications of Learning Analytics and AI in education that employ student data to improve learning and teaching is gaining worldwide attention. How can data and analytics be used to empower learners, and what is their impact on education? How can we ensure that AI and Learning Analytics are used to support learning while preserving their responsible usage? What are the challenges associated with striking this balance? What can constitute an equitable and fairer use of AI systems in education and Learning Analytics?
These are just some examples of the thought-provoking questions that we will highlight during the symposium!
The event will be held in-person at Scandic Hotel Ørnen in Bergen on Wednesday June 13th. This is a physical symposium, not a digital webinar, and lunch, coffee, tea and snacks will be served.
The symposium program will be announced as we get closer to the event itself, but the registration form is already open!
Registration deadline is June 8th.
ORGANISING COMMITTEE:

Mohammad Khalil

Mohammad Khalil is a senior researcher at the Centre for the Science of Learning & Technology (SLATE) and the project leader of European Erasmus+ project Remote Intelligent Access to Labs in Higher Education (RIALHE). Khalil has a PhD degree in Engineering Sciences with distinction from Graz University of Technology. He worked as a Postdoc at Delft University of Technology in Technology Enhanced Learning. Khalil is the PI of three Peder Sather projects in joint collaboration with University of California Berkeley on Learning Analytics and Recommendation systems in higher education. He has also been involved in several European projects: Scaling up Educational Innovation in Schools (SEIS), Open Educational Resources in Computational Biomedicine (OERCompBiomed), and European Network for Virtual lab & Interactive SImulated ONline learning 2027 (ENVISION2027).
Khalil is currently an associate editor of the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET) and served as a guest editor at the Journal of Computing in Higher Education, Journal of Learning Analytics, and the British Journal of Educational Technology. Khalil has more than 75 publications on ICT & learning. His key research interests include Technology Enhanced Learning, AI in Education, Learning Analytics, and Privacy and Ethics.

Mehdi Elahi

Mehdi Elahi is an Associate Professor at the University of Bergen (UiB), Norway. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 2014 and since then published more than 90 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications. His current #citation is 2900+ and his H-index is 25. His research has been mainly focused on AI, Data Science, and Cognitive Science, with an emphasis on their potential industrial applications such as on Recommender Systems. He has also co-invented and co-owned an AI-related US-patent. Mehdi Elahi has been involved in the authorship of several EU grant proposals such as the large-scale grants, recently funded with a budget of 30 Million Euro, where he will serve as WP Leader for 8 years. Before that, he has received prestigious research credits from giant IT industries (i.e., Amazon and Google). His research findings have been published in some of the most prestigious reference literature of the field including a recently authored book. He has organized International Data Challenges together with top Companies (i.e., Spotify and XING).

Barbara Wasson

Barbara Wasson, Director of the Centre for The Science of Learning and Technology (SLATE), University of Bergen, Norway is a full Professor in the Department of Information Science & Media Studies. She was one of the founders of Kaleidoscope, a European Network of Excellence on Technology Enhanced Learning, sat on the executive committee, and was leader of its CSCL SIG with over 400 members. She is currently co-leader of the Learning Analytics Community Europe SIG (LACE). Wasson is an expert evaluator in the European Commission. Wasson is/has been a PI for numerous national and international projects including the recent Trond Mohn project ‘AI and Education: Layers of Trust’. She has over 120 publications in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning.
In addition to her work for the Council of Europe, she is a member of the Norwegian Government’s expert group on learning analytics, which is looking at the technical, pedagogical, legal and ethical aspects of the implementation of learning analytics in the Norwegian educational sector.

For more information click here.

MediaFutures Seminar: Hidden in Plain Sight: Microcelebrities navigating visibility and surveillance on Twitter with Özlem Demirkol Tønnesen, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bergen
2023-06-09 12:00 - 13:00
Özlem Demirkol Tønnesen from the University of Bergenwill give a seminar on June 9th.
TITLE: Hidden in Plain Sight: Microcelebrities navigating visibility and surveillance on Twitter
WHEN: 9 June, 12:00 – 13:00
WHERE: MediaFutures
ABSTRACT:
On social media, microcelebrities and influencers play various roles and hold immense power as “focusers of attention” (Tufekci, 2013). This project was formed as an intervention to the growing interest these content creators receive in academic research for their ability to guide their audiences towards products and lifestyles they promote, while the similar effects they may produce when sharing political opinions, viewpoints and behaviors are neglected.
This talk is based on Özlem’s PhD research into Turkish Twitter microcelebrities and how they express antigovernment viewpoints and navigate the tensions between self-expression and self-preservation under an authoritarian regimese. Drawing from an analysis of tweets by 97 microcelebrity accounts in the 3-months leading up to the 2018 Turkish elections, she discusses how these accounts consider sharing political opinions and news as a duty despite apparent risks and express their thoughts through a narration of everyday life and daily events by formulating a language that is understood by subgroups who are acclimated to the platform culture.
BIO:
Özlem Demirkol Tønnesen is a postdoctor fellow at the ERC-project PREPARE – Distributed and prepared. A new theory of citizens` public connection networks in the age of datafication. She completed her PhD at the University of Southampton.

Data Science and AI in excellence research centers in Chile: IMFD, CENIA and I-Health
2023-06-07 12:00 - 14:00
Associate Professor, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile Denis Parra is principal researcher at the excellence research centers CENIA (National Center for Research in Artificial Intelligence in Chile), iHealth, and adjunct researcher at the IMFD (Millennium Institute for Research on Data Fundamentals). Prof. Parra research interests span Recommender Systems, Intelligent User Interfaces, Applications of Machine Learning (Healthcare, Creative AI) and Information Visualization.

Media City Bergens' Future Week: Workshop on Disinformation and Fake News
2023-06-05 12:00 - 2023-06-07 15:00
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there has been a marked increase in the spread of disinformation and propaganda by the Kremlin. The abundance of fabricated narratives has renewed attention the potential that automated fact-checking technologies have in combating false information online.
As part of MCB Future Week, MediaFutures is organizing a workshop on June 5 to address the issue of disinformation and fake news. The workshop will bring together media tech professionals and scientists to discuss the latest research and innovations in the field.
Program
Kl 12:00 – Welcome – Christoph Trattner
Kl 12:10 – Faktisk.no/IJ – Henrik Brattli Vold
Kl 12:40 – NORDIS – Laurence Dierickx
Kl 13:10 – Coffee and snacks
Kl 13:25 – MediaFutures – Duc Tien Dang Nguyen and Sohail Ahmed Khan
Kl 14:05 – Factiverse/UiS – Vinnay Setty
Kl 14:35 – Discussion – Led by: Duc Tien Dang Nguyen
Kl 15:00 – End
Descriptions of the talks and speakers

Faktisk.no/IJ – How Faktisk Verifiserbar verifies the war
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Faktisk Verifiserbar has been developing methods andworkflows to counter propaganda and get precise and verified information out from social media and into Norwegian newsrooms. During the course of these months, the newsroom has educated more than 30 journalists in open-source intelligence (OSINT) gathering, and their knowledge is being used to raise knowledge and awareness of the methods in many large newsrooms all over Norway. Henrik Brattli Vold will show you how they succeeded, and how they taught themselves to work with free or inexpensive tools to unmask the Ukrainian stories.
Henrik Brattli Vold is working at the Institute of Journalism in Pressens Hus, and he is also a fellow ofthe Faktisk Verifiserbar newsroom. He has experience working in very different fields and mediums, and he is now a journalism trainer.

NORDIS – Fact-checking the Ukraine war
As part of the Nordic Observatory for Digital Media and Information Disorder (NORDIS), theUniversity of Bergen focused on the tools and technologies likely to support or augment fact-checking practices. The research in this context encompasses state-of-the-art fact-checkingtechnologies, a study on the Nordic fact-checkers user needs, and designing and developinga set of multimedia forensic tools to support a human-in-the-loop approach, considering theend-user requirements.
Professional fact-checking activities can be schematized in a three-stage pipeline, whichconsists of identifying claims, verifying claims, and providing a verdict. However, this processis challenged by the complex application domain to which it relates – scientific, economic,political, cultural, social – and by the nature of the fact to check, either textual or audiovisual.Hence, to better understand the fact-checkers user needs and requirements in context, westudied the challenges of the Russian-Ukrainian war, which relates to the attempts tomanipulate public opinions through propaganda. What particular challenges do fact-checkersface? Does the socio-professional context affect the difficulties that fact-checkers encounter?Do fact-checkers perceive that they have adequate resources to perform their job efficiently?
To answer these questions, the research method included structured interviews with fact-checkers and an online questionnaire distributed during the Global Fact 9 Conference,organized in June 2022 in Oslo. 85 fact-checkers from 46 countries participated in thissurvey. Initial results showed that the main challenges they face concern access to reliablesources on either side of the conflict. They also underlined struggling to verify the informationpresented in manipulated context. Being a part of a global fact-checking network is viewedas an asset for exchanging information. Fact-checkers had mixed advice on the sufficiency ofthe tools at their disposal. However, they agreed on the need for new technological tools toprovide context and accurate translations.
Laurence Dierickx has a professional background in data and computational journalism. She holds a master’s degree in Information and communication science and technology and a PhD in Information and communication science. She is a researcher at the department of Information science and media studies at the University of Bergen and a data journalism teacher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium).

MediaFutures: The Future of Mis/Disinformation: The Risks of Generative Models and Detection Techniques for Countering Them

In this talk, we will explore the current progress of generative models and theirpotential in spreading misinformation and disinformation. Since recently, new generativemodels including GANs, Diffusion Models, Large Language Models have demonstratedremarkable progress in generating realistic fake (deepfake) content such as visuals, audios,and text. We will highlight the potential dangers that come with these powerful models, aswell as provide an insight into the research efforts being devised in order to detect fakecontent generated using these models. Also, the challenges associated with detecting suchcontent and the various efforts being devised to combat it will be briefly discussed. Overall,the talk will highlight the importance of being vigilant against the spread of mis/disinformation and the critical role that the detection models might play in mitigating its impact.

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’ WorkPackage 3, i.e., Media Content Production and Analysis.

MediaFutures: Detecting Cheapfakes – Lessons Learned from Three Years of Organizing the Grand Challenge
This talk discusses the challenges and lessons learned from three years of organizing agrand challenge focused on detecting out-of-context (OOC) images. Cheapfakes, which referto non-AI manipulations of multimedia content, are more prevalent than deepfakes and canbe created using editing software or by altering the context of a media through misleadingclaims. Detecting OOC media is much harder than fake media because the images andvideos are not tampered with.
Our challenge aims to develop and benchmark models that can detect whether a given newsimage and its associated captions are OOC, based on the recently compiled COSMOSdataset. Participants have developed state-of-the-art methods, and we will discuss theevaluation metrics used in the challenge. We have also learned valuable lessons on thecomplexities and nuances of detecting OOC images and the importance of creating diverseand representative datasets.
Additionally, we will share insights on the interdisciplinary collaboration needed to combatcheapfakes effectively. The talk highlights the significance of detecting OOC media in newsitems, specifically the misuse of real photographs with conflicting captions.

Duc-Tien Dang-Nguyen is an associate professor of computer science at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen. His main area of expertise is on multimedia forensics, lifelogging, multimedia retrieval, and computer vision. He is a member of MediaFutures WP3 – Media Content Analysis and Production in Journalism and The Nordic Observatory for Digital Media and Information Disorder (NORDIS). He is the author and co-author of more than 150 peer-reviewed and widely cited research papers. He is a PC member in a number of conferences in the fields of lifelogging, multimedia forensics, and pattern recognition. He is co-organiser of over 40 special sessions, workshops and research challenges from ACM MM, ACM ICMR, NTCIR, ImageClef and MediaEval during the last 10 years. He is General Chair of MMM 2023 and TPC co-Chair of ACM ICMR 2024.

Factiverse/UiS: Explainable AI for Automated Fact-Checking
Automated fact-checking using AI models has shown promising results to combatmisinformation, thanks to several large-scale datasets which are available. However, most models are opaque and do not provide reasoning behind their predictions. Moreover, with the recent popularity of LLMs such as GPT-3/4 by OpenAI, Llama by Meta and Bard by Google, there is renewed worry of misinformation. In this talk, I will enumerate the existing approaches w.r.t XAI for fact-checking and discuss the latest trends in this topic. The talk will also delve into what makes a good explanation in the context of fact-checking, and identify potential avenues for future research to address the current limitations.
Vinay Setty is a co-founder and the CTO of Factiverse. He is also an Associate Professor at University of Stavanger. His research area broadly includes natural language understanding (NLU), information retrieval (IR) and text mining involving unstructured textual documents as well as structured knowledge graphs. Specifically, automated fact-checking, question answering and coversational search over knowledge graphs. These days he is spending more time on his startup Factiverse with the mission to automate fact-checking using cutting edge AI and NLP. He has won the SR-Bank Innovation Prize for 2020 using the deep neural networks for fake news detection. He has a PhD from University of Oslo and he was a Postdoctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany.

You can sign up for the workshop here.

Visualization for Mobile Devices and Embedded Experiences
2023-05-11 12:45 - 13:45
Welcome to a new department seminar!

Abstract:
Mobile devices, such as smartwatches, fitness bands, and phones record a variety of data with the goal of making it immediately available to wearers. Smartwatch faces, for example, have become mini data dashboards that can give an overview of data such as step counts, heart rates, locations, sleep information or even device-external data such as the current temperature or weather predictions. Due to their small screen size and usage context, mobile device screens pose several novel and interesting challenges to visualization: visualizations need not only to be small and glanceable but also often to be read in motion. In this talk, I will present a summary of our past work on mobile device visualization and outline open research opportunities.

Bio:
Petra Isenberg is a research director(DR) at the Inria Saclay Centre at Université Paris-Saclay, France in the Aviz team and part of the Computer Science Laboratory (LISN) of the University Paris-Saclay. Her main research areas are visualization and visual analytics with a focus on visualization for non-desktop devices, interaction, and evaluation. Petra’s research papers have received awards at premiere venues in Visualization and HCI such as IEEE VIS, IEEE VAST, ACM CHI, or EuroVis. She is currently vice-chair of the IEEE VIS steering committee, AEiC at IEEE CG&A, and AE at Computer Graphics Forum. Prior to joining Inria, Petra received her PhD from the University of Calgary in 2010 on collaborative information visualization, and a Diplom Engineer degree in Computational Visualistics from the University of Magdeburg (2004).

Sammen med TekLab UiB inviterer vi til StudentDemo
2023-05-10 12:00 - 13:30
Sammen med TekLab UiB har vi gleden av til å invitere alle til StudentDemo den 10.mai.
Samarbeid med Akvariet i Bergen
På kurset MIX250: Bacheloroppgave i Medie- og interaksjonsdesign har studentene jobbet med Akvariet i Bergen med Aslak Sverdrup i spissen. Han er administrerende direktør for Akvariet, og har dette semesteret hatt et tett samarbeid med studentene om deres prosjekter. Tidligere i vår presenterte Aslak hvilke type tjenester Akvariet var interessert i at studentene skulle utforske, blant annet teknologi innen virtuell og utvidet virkelighet (VR/AR), interaktive skjermer og andre innovative løsninger for gode brukeropplevelser. Akvariets fremtidige planer om å bli til et nytt verdenshavsenter på Dokken ved navn “O” har også vært et sentralt tema for dette samarbeidet.
Resultatet av arbeidet er seks prototyper som er designet for ulike målgrupper og bruksområder, og den 10.mai skal studentene presentere sine løsninger for Akvariet på Media City Bergen!
Lars Nyre er faglærer på kurset sammen med medlærere Julia Hellem Brandt og Helene Høylandskjær, og lærer i designmetode Joao Ribeiro. Vi har også fått verdifulle bidrag fra Øyvind Steensen i Hidden, Ronald Toppe i Scary Weather, Audun Kløyve Gulbrandsen i Spello og Christen Hermansen i Future Solutions.
StudentDemoen arrangeres av TekLab ved Lars Nyre, Julia Hellem Brandt og Helene Høylandskjær i samarbeid med NCE Media ved Helge O. Svela og Charlotte Vindenes og MediaFutures.
TekLab er eit nettverk for forsking, utdanning og innovasjon innan medie- og kommunikasjonssektoren. Nettverket formidlar nyheitssaker og resultat frå prototyping og evaluering utført av studentar på bachelor og master, PhD-stipendiatar og seniorforskarar.
TekLab utviklar nye samarbeid som kan fremje teknologiutvikling i skjæringspunktet mellom forsking og utdanning. TekLab samarbeider med lokale og nasjonale teknologifirma innan medie- og kommunikasjonssektoren.
Program
12:00 – 12:05: Introduksjon ved Helge O. Svela og rektor ved Universitet i Bergen, Margareth Hagen.
12:05 – 12:35: Åpent gulv, demo av prototypene. Publikum får mulighet til å gå rundt og teste prototyper og prate med gruppene om deres prosjekt.
12:35 – 13:20: Pitch fra gruppene. Hver gruppe får 2 minutter til å pitche sine prototyper for ekspertpanelet og publikum. Ekspertpanelet vil etter hver pitch bruke 5 minutter på å stille spørsmål og gi tilbakemeldinger til gruppene.
13:20 – 13:30: Refleksjon om arbeidslivsrelevans. I samtale med Helge O. Svela skal rektor ved UiB, Margareth Hagen, tredjeårsstudent Martin Lund og andreårsstudent Fredrik Hajian reflektere om kurset og hvilken arbeidslivsrelevans den har.
Ekspertpanel
Margareth Hagen, rektor ved Universitetet i Bergen.
Aslak Sverdrup, administrerende direktør for Akvariet i Bergen.
Janicke Allers, investor og rådgiver for start-up bedrifter.
Leif Ove Larsen, professor i medievitenskap ved Universitetet i Bergen.
Prototypene
FiskAR: Oppdag havets hemmeligheter med FiskAR! Med vår prototype kan du med AR-teknologi oppleve dyrelivet i ditt nærområde på en interaktiv og engasjerende måte. Lær om ulike arter og hvordan forurensning truer havets økosystemer. Bli med på reisen for å øke bevisstheten rundt vår påvirkning på naturen. Prototypen er designet og utviklet av Hans Christian Haakonsen, Precilia Isaksen, Mathilde Solbakken Stenberg, Sara Tumey Celik Nystad og Julia Dietze Paulsen.
Oppdag O: Har du noen gang drømt om å utforske havets mange skatter og hemmeligheter? I Oppdag O blir verdenskartet levendegjort med framtidens AR-teknologi for å gi en utforskende og lærerik «heads-up, hands-free» opplevelse full av diskusjon, samarbeid, og fysisk bevegelse. Prototypen er designet og utviklet av Emma Husa, Sara Rachel Johnsen, Amalie Kjersem, Håkon Lystad og Alrik Strandnæs Olsen.
PingFinn: Pingfinn gir deg et innblikk i de unike personlighetene til pingvinene ved bruk av kunstig intelligens. Ta et bilde og bli kjent med pingvinene på Akvariet! Prototypen er designet og utviklet av Mohamedamin Ayanle Godor, Markus Jin Hovland, Hedvig Bache Hungnes, Maja Sandvik og Amanda Jørgensen Værøy.
Havkompis: Hvordan kan man skape engasjement og lærelyst om havet og dets beboere blant barn og unge på en underholdende måte? Havkompis er en interaktiv læringsplattform med formål om nettopp dette. Gjennom profiler om Akvariets ulike arter og enkle aktiviteter, har vi som formål å spre kunnskap og læring på en måte som fanger barnas oppmerksomhet og bidrar til lærelyst. Prototypen er designet og utviklet av Emily Wei Stokke Dishington, Adrian Reksten Ringdal, Iselin Ågotnes Steffensen, Marte Hestetun Svinø og Irene Ulveseth.
Ark: ARK er en plattform som skal bidra til en mer effektiv og trygg arbeidsflyt hos Akvariet, og dermed sikre god dyrevelferd og mer tid til formidling for de ansatte! Prototypen er designet og utviklet av Helena Graver Arvidsson, Kaja Qvigstad Eek, Mari Elise Bøe, Martin Lund og Anna Solvoll Saugestad.
Dypdykk: Den digitale læringsplattformen Dypdykk tilbyr skoleklasser et organisert, fleksibelt og morsomt opplegg i forbindelse med et besøk på Akvariet! Prototypen er designet og utviklet av Emilie Engberg Andersen, Lukas William Larsen, Marie Moksheim, Thea Torgrimsen Svinø og Johanna Utle.
Alle prorotypene vil bli publisert på TekLab sin nettside på slutten av semesteret. Stay tuned!

SXSW 2023: Siste nytt om teknologi, medier og samfunn med Anders Hofseth fra NRKbeta
2023-05-09 12:00 - 13:00
SXSW 2023: Siste nytt om teknologi, medier og samfunn fra verdens største møteplass for smarte folk og klovner

Anders Hofseth fra NRKbeta går igjennom hovedlinjene fra SXSW 2023-konferansen.
Hvor: MediaFutures, Media City Bergen
Når: 9. mai, 12:00

Anders Hofseth er kommentator og strategisk rådgiver i NRKbeta, rikskringkasterens innsiktsmiljø for skjæringen teknologi – medier – samfunn. Mye av jobben hans er å samle innsikt, forsøke å forstå endringer, og sette dem i kontekst for NRK, så bedriften kan fortsette å løse allmennkringkasteroppdraget best mulig i skiftende tider.

Bergen HCI and Visualisation Days 2023
2023-05-09 - 2023-05-12
MediaFutures invities to HCI and Visualisation Days 2023
DAY 1: Tue 9th May 2023 (host: Morten)
10:15: Interacting with AI: A visualization perspective: talk by Michael Sedlmair
Meeting in smaller groups:
We invite you to present your respective PhD/PostDoc projects, followed by discussion, thereby aiming to:

i) making your ongoing work know to experts in your field
ii) providing your with qualified feedback

iii) potentially opening doors for future collaboration
14.00: Floris van den Oever, PhD-student, Psychology and InfoMedia, Maritime Initiative, UiB
AR for ship bridges
14.45: Ingar Arntzen, PhD-student, Norce Research, UiT and MediaFutures WP4 Bridging the gap between Interactive and Linear Media Experiences, by creating a programming model for timed application state
DAY 2: Wed 10th May 2023 (smaller groups continued; host: Morten)
10:00: Oda Elise Nordberg, PhD student, InfoMedia,UiB Conversational news interactions
10:45: Peter Okopny, PhD-student, InfoMedia, UiB
Why don’t we have “Google Docs” for Video?
12:15: Live demo of BSc-students AR prototypes; link to event
14:00: Rikke Aas, PhD-student, Informatikk, UiB
Responsible Engagement in Humanized Visualizations
14:45: Yong Ma, PostDoc, Medical faculty (K1), ANeED project, UiB
From Speech Emotion to Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB) Detection
DAY 3: Thu 11th May 2023 (host: Helwig)
12.45: Visualization for Mobile Devices and Embedded Experiences: talk by Petra Isenberg
DAY 4: Fri 12 May 2023 (host: Helwig)
Afternoon: A hike, if the weather allows! Details to follow.
Velkommen!Morten Fjeld, InfoMedia, UiB and Helwig Hauser, Informatikk, UiB

MediaFutures Seminar: Chatting Communities into Existence: Local Chat Groups as Emerging Civic Infrastructures with Emilija Gagrčin from the University of Mannheim
2023-04-28 12:00 - 13:00
Emilija Gagrčin from the University of Mannheim will give a seminar on April 28th
TITLE: Chatting Communities into Existence: Local Chat Groups as Emerging Civic Infrastructures
WHEN: 28 April, 12:00 – 13:00

ABSTRACT:

This presentation explores the civic potential of messenger groups. It zooms into the everyday communication in local chat groups, focusing on the case study of building chat groups in urban neighborhoods from a comparative perspective. Drawing on interviews with building chat group members in Israel and Germany, we investigate how building communities are co-constructed between platform affordances and user practices, and how civic norms are negotiated between online and offline communication spaces. We map the uses, gratifications, and constraints of the chat groups and their relations with the spatial organization, informational flows, and socio-political environment in each community.
BIO:
Dr. Emilija Gagrčin is a research associate at the University of Mannheim and affiliated with the ERC project PREPARE at the University of Bergen.
Her research focus is on political media use. In particular, she is interested in social, normative, and infrastructural aspects of digital political communication, such as on social media and messenger apps. She focuses on norms and competencies necessary for a democratic coexistence in networked societies.
Dr. Emilija Gagrčin is affiliated with the Digital Political Inequality Lab at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the Weizenbaum Panel research group at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin. She is also a representative of Early-Career Scholars in the management team of the Political Communication Section of the European Communication Research and Education Conference (ECREA).
Organizer
This seminar is a collaboration between MediaFutures and the ERC project PREPARE.

Norway Fintech Festival - Game Show: Generative AI and the unknown use cases - All against 1
2023-04-26 15:30 - 16:00
On Wednesday April 26th, our researcher Samia Touileb will participate in a session on Generative AI at the Norway Fintech Festival.
You can read more about it and get tickets here.

Meeting grand challenges together: actionable knowledge through collaboration in research and innovation
2023-04-26 09:00
The conference will explore collaboration across sectors to bring forth knowledge that is actionable and relevant for solving pressing issues. Academia and other actors in society need to jointly identify challenges and questions that are societally urgent and academically relevant, critically examine our different roles in knowledge production and the tools and frameworks that can enable meaningful cross-sectorial collaboration for actionable knowledge. Finally, we need to reflect on whose voices are included in defining the challenges and as sources of knowledge and wisdom and how we might broaden the debate. By convening a dialogue between academia and public and private actors, the conference aims to take stock of lessons learnt so far and bring forth insights on how we might create viable collaborative partnerships in the future.

Registration deadline : 23.04.
Register here.
Programme
9:00 Opening
9:15 Keynote – Complexity, urgency and the imperative to collaborate
Jeroen van der Sluijs Professor at the Centre for the Study of the Science and the Humanities, University of Bergen
9:45 Group work reflecting on the questions to be discussed in the following roundtable sessions
10:15 Roundtable 1 – Taking stock: what have we learnt in the last decades of collaboration and stakeholder engagement in research and innovation?
This roundtable discussion will explore experiences with collaboration and stakeholder engagement in research and innovation for actionable knowledge, and findings from research on such processes. We will discuss lessons learnt from previous projects in order to identify barriers and opportunities for meaningful collaboration in research. The panellists will reflect on when, from their various perspectives, it is relevant and beneficial to engage in collaborative knowledge production ventures.
Moderator:
Siri Gloppen Professor and Director at the Centre on Law & Social Transformation
Panelists:
Stina E. Oseland Director of the Climate Agency, Bergen Municipality
Marieke van Haaren Coordinator of the project Learning with the City, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Brooke E Wilkerson PhD fellow at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation, University of Bergen
11:15 Coffee Break
11:30 Roundtable 2 – Roles and knowledge needs: what knowledge is needed to meet the challenges of our time and how can we build on our respective strengths?
Is there a tension between what is societally and academically relevant and urgent, and, if so, how might we navigate different needs also in situations that are not necessarily characterised by win-win? This roundtable will examine which questions and types of knowledge that should be the focus on cross-sector collaboration. Which knowledge needs are better met in-house and in which instances would collaboration with universities be meaningful? The panelists will examine the roles of different actors in producing actionable knowledge, and reflect on how to approach the power asymmetries between different partners and stakeholders that are involved in collaborative knowledge production.
Moderator:
Scott Bremer Researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities, University of Bergen
Panelists:
Nicole Klenk Associate professor and Co-director of the Environmental Science in Society Lab, University of Toronto, Canada
Anna Steynor Senior Climate Services Scientist at the Met Office, UK
Maud Borie Lecturer in Human Geography at the research group Contested Development, King’s College London, UK
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Roundtable 3 – Reaching out: how can we broaden the range of actors/perspectives involved in co-producing knowledge?
Collaborative projects between academia and other sectors of society are usually limited to formal, institutional actors. How does this affect the co-production of knowledge and how societies navigate grand challenges? Is there a risk of narrowing the debate or reinforcing the agendas of powerful actors? The session will examine practical opportunities to broaden the range of actors and perspectives engaged in the creation of actionable knowledge.
Moderator:
Håvard Haarstad Professor and Director of the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation
Panelists:
Esperanza Diaz Professor and Director of the Pandemic Center, University of Bergen
Christine Jacobsen Professor of Social Anthropology at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, University of Bergen
Simon Neby Professor at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation, University of Bergen
14:30 Roundtable 4 – Institutionalising collaboration for actionable knowledge: from projects to partnerships
Collaborative knowledge production tends to be organised as relatively short-term projects. How does this influence the types of engagement that is possible? When might longer-term partnerships be more relevant? This session will examine how we can institutionalise cross-sectorial collaboration for actionable knowledge short- and long term. What types of institutional support are needed from universities and other societal actors?
Moderator:
Christoph Trattner Professor and Director of MediaFutures: Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation
Panelists:
Gunn Mangerud Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Bergen
Helge O. Svela CEO of Media City Bergen
Torleif Markussen Lunde Director of the Eitri Medical Incubator, VIS and University of Bergen
15:30 Group work reflecting on recommendations
16:00 Concluding plenary session: Recommendations
16:30 End of conference

Mid-term evaluation of PhD candidate Sohail Ahmed Khan
2023-04-25 14:30 - 16:00
We are delighted to invite you to the public part of the mid-term evaluation of Sohail Ahmed Khan on April 25th at 14:30. The event will take place at MediaFutures Meeting Room (MCB, 3rd floor).During the presentation, Sohail will discuss his work on “Computational Visual Content Verification,” which is part of MediaFutures’ WorkPackage-3. He will showcase his progress, main findings, and future plans, focusing on developing (semi) automated visual content verification prototypes using AI techniques such as deep learning, computer vision, and NLP. Sohail’s research aims to provide solutions for various research problems, including developing prototypes for deepfake and cheapfake detection. The resulting prototypes will be made available to industry partners for further tailoring and incorporation into their workflows.The presentation will start with a 30-minute talk by Sohail, followed by a 15-minute Q&A session where the audience can ask questions. After that, we will continue with the internal part of the evaluation.The evaluation committee includes Sohail’s main supervisor, Duc Tien Dang Nguyen (UiB), co-supervisor, Andreas Lothe Opdahl (UiB), additional mentors and supervisors Fazle Rabbi (UiB) and Sergej Stoppel (Wolftech), and additional committee member Morten Fjeld (UiB).Your presence and contributions would be greatly appreciated.

MediaFutures Seminar: Computing Biases in Recommender Systems with Marko Tkalčič, University of Primorska
2023-04-14 13:30 - 14:15
Marko Tkalčič from the University of Primorska in Koper, Slovenia will give a seminar on April 14th.
TITLE: Computational Psychology in Recommender Systems
WHEN: 14 April, 13:30 – 14:1

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. Behavioral modeling can amplify existing biases in datasets. In this talk I will show how the usage of complementary research in computational psychology, such as detection of personality and emotions, can help recommender systems to mitigate both data/algorithm biases and cognitive biases.
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.

MediaFutures and SUJO Joint Guest Lecture: Countering Russian Disinformation with Maksym Balaklytskyi from Kharkiv National University
2023-04-12 12:00 - 13:00
Maksym Balaklytsky from Kharkiv National Univeristy in Ukraine will give a seminar on April 12th.
TITLE: Countering Russian Disinformation
WHEN: 12 April, 12:00 – 13:00
WHERE: MediaFutures

ABSTRACT:

Russian propaganda has played a major role in the country’s aggression against Ukraine since 2014. It takes many forms, including imperialism, globalism, and a longing for the Soviet Union. Disinformation is one of its most important tactics, and Russia portrays itself as both a superpower and a victim of sinister forces.
The current “Big Lie” is that all territories ever controlled by the Russian empire or USSR are now canonical territory of the Russian Federation. Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova are the main targets of this propaganda due to their common past and Russian-speaking populations. While Belarus tries to retain power and avoid competition with the West, Ukraine has been making efforts to strengthen its connections with the EU and NATO. Despite Russian interference, Ukraine is slowly moving away from Russian influence.
In response, Russia has openly attacked Ukraine, claiming to liberate it from a Nazi regime and condemning any attempts to diminish Ukraine’s connections to its Soviet past, Russian language, and Orthodox church. The main political crime of the Ukrainian government, in this view, is the drive to diminish the above-mentioned sacred ties with Russia. Any alternatives to these three are declared illegal, irrational, unfounded and immoral.
BIO:
Maksym Balaklytskyi is a Professor of the Journalism Department of V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, the highest-ranked Ukrainian University in the QS World University Ranking – in 2023, so it has been some years already. He holds a PhD in Social Communications from Institute of Journalism at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Because of the full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine, he came to the UK in January 2023, aiming to do research on countering Russian propaganda. Now he is a Visiting Fellow to the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University, UK. He is a news editor at Hope Media Group, contributor to the prominent national and B2B media outlets in Ukraine, author of 4 books, 2 student textbooks, and tens of academic articles.
