Algorithms with a Moral Compass: Detecting Lies, Satire, and Clickbait
Come join the London sections of IEEE Women in Engineering, IEEE Computer Society, and IEEE Young Professionals for “Algorithms with a Moral Compass: Detecting Lies, Satire, and Clickbait” with Victoria Rubin, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Information & Media Studies and Director of Language & Information Technology Research Lab, Western University.
When: Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018; 6:00 pm
Where: SEB 3102, Spencer Engineering Building, Western University
North American digital environments are increasingly mediated by algorithms in 2018. Users of social media platforms and other online services are constantly advised on what actions to take: what to purchase, how and when to exercise, who to contact, and what to watch and read. Most algorithms for personalization, recommendation, filtering, and content promotion are optimized for profit and do not concern themselves with issues of moral rights and wrongs. The question is: why not? Moral values are important for each individual and the society at large, for justice, impartiality, and equality. If certain decisions are delegated to algorithms for lack of human time or oversight, there should be a greater emphasis on morally-savvy technologies. In this talk, Prof. Rubin will explain predictive modeling with measurable linguistic features in texts (such as complexity, uncertainty, non-immediacy, diversity, affect, specificity, expressiveness, and informality). A limited number of such tools became available to the public by around 2010, and not many are currently in use by social media platforms and digital news aggregators, and the situation needs to change.
Everyone (women and men engineer/scientist) is welcome! Admission is free. Refreshments will be provided.
If you have any questions, please contact Rebecca Jevnikar at rjevnikar@gmail.com.
We look forward to seeing you at this event!
Date and Time
Location
Hosts
Registration
- Date: 23 Jan 2018
- Time: 06:00 PM to 07:30 PM
- All times are (GMT-05:00) Canada/Eastern
- Add Event to Calendar
- 1151 Richmond Street
- London, Ontario
- Canada
- Building: Spencer Engineering Building
- Room Number: SEB 3102
- Contact Event Host
-
jammalmanar@gmail.com
- Starts 05 January 2018 10:00 AM
- Ends 23 January 2018 04:00 PM
- All times are (GMT-05:00) Canada/Eastern
- No Admission Charge
Speakers
Victoria Rubin
Algorithms with a Moral Compass: Detecting Lies, Satire, and Clickbait
Biography:
Victoria Rubin is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies and the Director of the Language and Information Technologies Research Lab (LiT.RL) at the University of Western Ontario. She specializes in information retrieval and natural language processing techniques that enable analyses of texts to identify, extract, and organize structured knowledge. She studies complex human information behaviors that are, at least partly, expressed through language such as deception, uncertainty, credibility, and emotions. Rubin and her students at the LiT.RL, have been working on algorithmic identification of various types of “fakes” in the digital news since 2014.
Rubin’s research is in the field of Automated Deception Detection, at the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning and its roots in Interpersonal Psychology, Communication Studies, and Law Enforcement. Deception detection methodologies distinguish truthful texts from deceptive ones based on the writer’s deliberate intentions to create false impressions in the readers’ minds. Rubin’s lab, LiT.RL has been developing a News Verification Browser that incorporates deception detection (for false news) and other content verification methods such as detection of clickbait, satire, and native ads. The browser is meant to augment human discernment, rather than replace it, by highlighting potentially false or misleading information which may require further human scrutiny. Users’ critical thinking still remains the key information literacy skill in navigating the increasingly toxic online environments.
Her research on Deception Detection has been published in recent core workshops on the topic and prominent information science conferences, as well as the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. She is a Recipient of the 2006 Citation of Merit from the Association of Women in Science (AWIS) Educational Foundation in Washington, D.C., for her dissertation on Identifying Certainty in Texts. Her 2015–2018 project entitled Digital Deception Detection: Identifying Deliberate Misinformation in Online News is funded by the Government of Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant.