CS Events Monthly View

Computer Science Department Colloquium

Towards understanding and defending against algorithmically curated misinformation

 

Download as iCal file

Friday, March 24, 2023, 10:30am - 11:30am

 

Speaker: Prerna Juneja

Bio

Prerna Juneja is a social computing researcher at the University of Washington. She combines data-driven techniques, and human-centered design processes with large-scale real-world deployments to understand and then build defenses against problematic online phenomena. Prerna’s research has won multiple awards at human-computer interaction venues, such as ACM CHI, and ACM CSCW, and has been funded by the prestigious Social Data Research and Dissertation Fellowship. Her work has also received widespread press coverage by notable news channels, such as The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Sky News, and Seattle Times.

Location : Core 301

Event Type: Computer Science Department Colloquium

Abstract: Search engines and social media platforms are an indispensable part of our lives. Despite their increasing popularity, their search, ranking, and recommendation algorithms remain a black box to the users. The relevance of results produced by these search engines is driven by market factors and not by the quality of the content of those results. There is no guarantee that the information presented to people on online platforms is credible. To make matters worse, there are increasing concerns that online platforms amplify inaccurate information, making it easily accessible via search results and recommendations. My research takes a step towards understanding and designing defenses against algorithmically curated and amplified misinformation. In this talk, I will first present the results of a series of algorithmic audits I performed on online platforms to determine the extent to which algorithms contribute to the spread of misinformation and under which conditions they do so. Second, I'll present the design of an online system that aims to monitor an online platform for misinformation, developed in collaboration with several fact-checking organizations. Finally, I will discuss the opportunities in the space of algorithm auditing and the various ways in which we can redress the harm caused by the algorithms.

Contact  Matthew Stone

Zoom
https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/95036462743?pwd=ZWp6eXJwcE1jRUZWRTU5NnFXNCtyQT09