The machine in the headlines
Fake news is fuelling rising public mistrust of the media, politics and big business, with even health services subject to conspiracy around life-saving vaccines and other treatments. What role does AI play in creating and disseminating fake news and how can we harness the same technologies to counteract them.
Our panel of experts include:
Yulan He is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Warwick. Her research centres on the exploration of statistical models in representing uncertainty and the benefit they bring over earlier work in a wide range of application areas, particularly the integration of machine learning and natural language processing for text understanding. Some of her interested research topics include sentiment analysis and opinion mining, topic/event extraction from text, combining language and vision for multimodal analysis, clinical text mining, conversational agents and social media analytic
Bertie Vidgen is a researcher on two of the Alan Turing Institute’s projects, The (Mis)Informed Citizen and Hate Speech: Measure and Counter-measures. His main research is focused on detecting, analysing, and countering online hate speech, examining it in the context of both news and social media. In his work, he primarily uses computational social science methods, including machine learning, natural language processing, and statistical modelling.
Chloe Colliver leads the Digital Analysis Unit at London-based think tank ISD, where she heads the programme of research exploring the tactics, actors and systems involved in the promotion of terrorism, extremism and disinformation online. Her work at ISD also involves the design of responses to these kinds of digital threat, working with academia, policymakers, technologists disinformation or extremist activity online. and civil society to confront the exploitation of technology for malicious purposes. This includes support to national governments in the design of digital policy regulation, as well as collaboration with technologists and academia to harness AI and ML to find opportunities for interventions to challenge.
Rob Procter is Professor of Social Informatics and deputy head (research) in the Department of Computer Science, Warwick University. Previously he has held positions at Manchester and Edinburgh universities. His research interests are strongly inter-disciplinary, and include social media analytics and social data science. Rob’s current data science-related research includes the use of machine learning to: predict the veracity of content posted in social media and; analyse factors that influence the propagation of inflammatory postings. He is also interested in a number of other areas related to data science. These include methodological and ethical issues in the use of new forms of data in social research. More generally, he is interested: in applications of big data analytics in domains such as smart cities and healthcare; investigating social and technical issues that may influence the adoption of data science across academic, commercial and public sectors.
Chaired by writer and broadcaster Timandra Harkness. Timandra presents BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofing and has presented the documentaries, Data, Data Everywhere, Personality Politics & The Singularity.
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