CLOSED - Fighting Fake News & Hate Speech: web search, language analysis, and user experience

This project is closed.

NOTE: I have funded many undergraduates as research assistants, but NOT until after they have first spent time working with my lab to prove their commitment and competence, via volunteering and/or an independent study for course credit. Do not expect to be paid before you have proven your commitment and ability to contribute to advancing research. About the lab: https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/research/labs/ir-crowdsourcing-lab Fighting Fake News: PDF: https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ml/papers/nguyen-uist18.pdf Demo: http://fcweb.pythonanywhere.com/ Video: https://youtu.be/TlY_Acr7gYs Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/mattlease/believe-it-or-not-designing-a-huma… * Anubrata Das, Kunjan Mehta, and Matthew Lease. *CobWeb: A Research Prototype for Exploring User Bias in Political Fact-Checking*. In ACM SIGIR Workshop on Fairness, Accountability, Confidentiality, Transparency, and Safety in Information Retrieval (FACTS-IR), 2019. [pdf (https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.03718) | conference-website (https://facts-ir-2019.hotcrp.com/) ] * Nguyen et al. *Believe it or not: Designing a Human-AI Partnership for Mixed-Initiative Fact-Checking*. In Proceedings of the 31st ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST), pages 189--199, 2018. [ pdf, demo, slides above -- sourcecode (https://github.com/thanhan/uist18) ] * An Thanh Nguyen, Aditya Kharosekar, Matthew Lease, and Byron C. Wallace. *An Interpretable Joint Graphical Model for Fact-Checking from Crowds*. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-18), pages 1511--1518, 2018. [pdf (https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ml/papers/nguyen-aaai18.pdf) | sourcecode (http://github.com/thanhan/fc-aaai18) ] * Matthew Lease. *Fact Checking and Information Retrieval*. In Proceedings of the 1st Biannual Conference on the Design of Experimental Search & Information REtrieval Systems (DESIRES), pages 97--98, 2018. [ pdf (https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ml/papers/lease-desires18.pdf) | conference-website (http://desires.dei.unipd.it/) | slides (https://www.slideshare.net/mattlease/fact-checking-information-retrieval) ] * Qiwei Li. *Clickbait and Emotional Language in Fake News*. Bachelor's thesis, University of Texas at Austin, Department of Computer Science, 2019. [ pdf (https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ml/papers/li2019-thesis.pdf) ]

Qualifications

For back-end work (algorithms), comfort with programming (eg python) and using statistics. For front-end work (interface, user experience), comfort in design and front-end programming technologies.

Duties

Work with graduate students and/or professor to implement and benchmark statistical algorithms. Expected to maintain weekly contact. Hours can be varied, depending on time available, but must commit to at least one semester of work to justify our time teaching and training you. Depending on prior skill and experience, degree of supervision and sophistication tasks will be tailored accordingly. You will be expected to document your research activities in writing, with the opportunity to publish a technical report or research at the end.

Desired Length of Commitment
at least 1 semester

I'M INTERESTED IN THIS PROJECT. WHAT SHOULD I DO NEXT?

The Office of Undergraduate Research recommends that you attend an info session or advising before contacting faculty members or project contacts about research opportunities. We'll cover the steps to get involved, tips for contacting faculty, funding possibilities, and options for course credit. Once you have attended an Office of Undergraduate Research info session or spoken to an advisor, you can use the "Who to contact" details for this project to get in touch with the project leader and express your interest in getting involved.

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