Title: Facing disinformation in social media with focus on its social impact

The integration of social media into our daily lives has been both transformative and essential, offering numerous advantages in how we communicate, share information, and engage with the world. However, alongside these benefits comes a growing concern: the widespread dissemination of misinformation. This challenge not only distorts public perception but can also significantly influence critical societal events, such as elections and public health crises. In this talk, we will present research from the UGRITAIlab at the University of Granada, specifically in the field of fake news detection and analysis. Our research spans several key areas, with a particular emphasis on the social impact of misinformation. Central to this work is our DESINFOSCAN Framework, which includes a social impact module and a credibility analysis module.

The social impact module focuses on analyzing the influence of misinformation by utilizing advanced topic detection and argumentation techniques to examine social media discussions. Meanwhile, the credibility module uses word embeddings to identify credible individuals and those whose contributions are valuable to the discourse on specific topics across social networks. By addressing these issues, we aim to offer insights into how misinformation can be mitigated and how trustworthiness in social media interactions can be enhanced.

The seminar is digital only. The zoom link can be found below.

SPEAKER: José A. Díaz-García

J. Ángel Díaz-García, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science and AI at the University of Granada (UGR). He graduated as a Computer Engineer in 2016, receiving an award for outstanding academic performance. Subsequently, he ventured into the professional field as an SQL analyst at Asexor, gaining professional experience in the private sector. In 2017, he completed the qualifying master’s degree in Computer Engineering. During this period, José Ángel began to specialize in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), leading him to pursue the master’s degree in Data Science at UGR, thereby consolidating his knowledge in AI. During this time, he made his first scientific contributions at international conferences as part of a research initiation scholarship for master’s students. After completing this second master’s degree, he participated as a data scientist in international projects at the Universities of Oviedo and Granada. In 2019, he was awarded an FPU scholarship from the Ministry, marking the beginning of his doctoral studies in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP), which culminated in the defense of his thesis on October 27, 2023, with honors in international doctorate and CUM LAUDE. Throughout his research career, he has contributed to 4 publications (JCRD Q1, Q2) in the field of NLP and participated in 15 international and 4 national conferences. He has also collaborated on 6 projects, including NOFACEPS, of which he is the principal investigator, and two international projects, such as COPKIT, where he contributed with a significant unsupervised sentiment analysis method. José Ángel has completed research stays at the University of Lisbon with Professor Joao Paulo Carvalho and at Imperial College London, where he worked at the Data Science Institute with J. Amador Diaz-Lopez. As a result of the collaboration with Imperial College, a contribution was made to an international conference in the field of misinformation in networks. Additionally, the organization of a special session at a conference was initiated, and currently, this relationship continues with two publications under review.

Finally, it is worth highlighting the management and leadership skills demonstrated by José Ángel, which led to the acquisition of a research project at UGR, where he is the principal investigator, and which concluded with the publication of the NOFACE credibility analysis system in the journal Expert Systems With Applications (JCR Q1). He was also part of the organizing committee of the FQAS 2023 international conference and the program committee of the COMS2 international conference in India. He has organized special sessions at 3 international conferences, outreach workshops, and given interviews on radio and in the press.