MisinfoWorkshop2019: International Workshop on Misinformation, Computational Fact-Checking and Credible Web Hyatt Regency San Francisco Hotel San Francisco, CA, United States, May 14, 2019 |
Conference website | https://sites.google.com/view/misinfoworkshop |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=misinfoworkshop2019 |
Poster | download |
Submission deadline | February 8, 2019 |
Workshop Objectives
Our society is struggling with an unprecedented amount of falsehoods which do harm to wealth, democracy, health, and national security. In domestic political controversies, politicians repeat false claims even after they are debunked. “Fake news” is fabricated to spread derogatory rumors, promote societal and political tensions, manipulate public opinion, and influence national election outcome. The problem is further exacerbated by social media bots and clickbaits that spread and amplify falsehoods, as well as other forms of harmful information such as fake reviews, spams and scams, propaganda, and astroturfing.
Debunking misinformation and disinformation calls for interdisciplinary collaboration of and advancement in multiple areas, including journalism, communication studies, law and public policy, psychology, and political science. Computing technology plays a crucial role in it. The last several years have witnessed a substantial growth in efforts for computational fact-checking, of which many are data-driven, AI-powered, and include human in the loop. These efforts tackle various fronts, such as the detection of fabricated news, rumors, and spams on social media, automation in fact-checking, flagging clickbait articles, discovering fake accounts and malicious social media bots, data and publishing standards, benchmark datasets, and visualization.
As AI brings fundamental transformations to our society, it has also raised significant ethics concerns regarding fairness, transparency, trust, and misuse. The ethics concerns are particularly pertinent to fact-checking---while fact-checkers discern truth from false, who is there to check them? Furthermore, the harm of misuse of AI is already manifested in this arena, posing future challenges to fact-checking related efforts. For instance, creators of falsehoods in all forms may optimize their reach to target audience and maximize their financial and political gains through sophisticated orchestration of content, metadata, images, audience, and propagation network, and such can be steered by AI algorithms. Finally, maintaining a high bar of ethics in fact-checking related research itself, particularly ensuring the reproducibility of research results, is vital to the health of the fact-checking enterprise.
The success of fact-checking lies in not only methodology and technology but also education. To help cultivate a society that is more robust to falsehoods, to break “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers”, we must raise the awareness of all aspects about misinformation and disinformation and we must train a generation of Web users that are well versed in media literacy, data literacy, and logic and fallacy.
Workshop Topics and Themes
The workshop aims at bringing together researchers, practitioners, and educators in computer science, journalism, communication studies, information science and systems, law and public policy, psychology, and political science to explore topics in four themes:
- Computational algorithms, tools, systems, and applications for tackling misinformation and disinformation.
- Study of principles, methodologies, phenomena, and policy pertinent to misinformation and disinformation, in non-computing fields, including but not limited to journalism, communication studies, information science and systems, law and public policy, psychology, and political science. Preference is given to studies that take computational and/or data-driven approaches to the challenge.
- Studies that address the ethical pitfalls in computational fact-checking and propose solutions to ensure fairness, transparency, and interpretability of fact-checking tools or mitigating the challenges posed by malicious adversaries who misuse advanced computing and AI technologies.
- Fact-checking education, including media literacy, data literacy, and logic and fallacy.
Specifically, the workshop welcomes submissions on topics related to the following non-exclusive aspects:
- Artifacts/phenomena: fact-checks, fake news, bots, rumors, computational propaganda, spams, scams, astroturfing, fake reviews, filter bubble, echo chamber
- Computational methodology: artificial intelligence, crowdsourcing, data analytics, data and content management, data cleaning, data mining, human-computer interaction, information integration, knowledge bases and knowledge graphs, machine learning, natural language processing, search, security and privacy, social media analysis, user interface, visualization, Web technology
- Ethical pitfalls and solutions: bias, fairness, transparency, interpretability, explainability in computational fact-checking; countering misuse of algorithms in creating falsehoods; reproducibility of and resources for fact-checking research Education: methods, resources, practices, empirical experience and evaluation of fact-checking related education (e.g., media literacy, data literacy, and logic and fallacy)
Submission Instructions
The proceedings of the workshops will be published jointly with the Web Conference proceedings. Papers must be submitted in PDF according to the ACM format published in the ACM guidelines (www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template), selecting the generic “sigconf” sample. The PDF files must have all non-standard fonts embedded. Workshop papers must be self-contained and in English. Papers submitted cannot exceed six pages in length, including references and appendix. Submissions are handled through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=misinfoworkshop2019
Important Dates
All deadlines are 11:59pm EST (Eastern Standard Time)
Paper submission deadline: Friday, Feb 8, 2019
Notification of acceptance: Monday, February 25, 2019
Camera-ready deadline: Sunday, March 3, 2019
Workshop date: Tuesday, May 14, 2019, San Francisco, CA - Co-located with The Web Conference 2019
Workshop Chairs
Laks V.S. Lakshmanan (University of British Columbia, Canada, laks@cs.ubc.ca)
Chengkai Li (University of Texas at Arlington, USA, cli@uta.edu)
Paolo Papotti (Eurecom, France, papotti@eurecom.fr)
Steering Committee
Bill Adair (Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, USA)
Juliana Freire (New York University, USA)
Laks V.S. Lakshmanan (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Chengkai Li (University of Texas at Arlington, USA)
Ioana Manolescu (Inria Saclay, France)
Alexios Mantzarlis (International Fact-Checking Network, Poynter Institute, USA)
Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
Paolo Papotti (Eurecom, France)
Jun Yang (Duke University, USA)
Cong Yu (Google Research, USA)
Program Committee
Pankaj K. Agarwal (Duke University, USA)
Jisun An (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar)
Mevan Babakar (Full Fact, UK)
Simon Baumgartner (Google, USA)
James Caverlee (Texas A&M University, USA)
Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia (University of South Florida, USA)
Nicholas Diakopoulos (School of Communication, Northwestern University, USA)
Peter Fray (School of Communication, University of Technology Sydney, Australia)
Luis Gravano (Columbia University, USA)
James T. Hamilton (Department of Communication, Stanford University, USA)
Naeemul Hassan (University of Mississippi, USA)
Angela Lee (School of Arts, Technology and Emerging Communication, University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
Shirin Nilizadeh (University of Texas at Arlington, USA)
Deokgun Park (University of Texas at Arlington, USA)
Craig Silverman (Buzzfeed, USA)
Mark Stancel (Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, USA)
Jonathan Stray (School of Journalism, Columbia University, USA)
Xavier Tannier (Sorbonne Universite, France)
Mark Tremayne (Department of Communication, University of Texas at Arlington, USA)
Immanuel Trummer (Cornell University, USA)
Will Wu (Google, USA)
Gensheng Zhang (Google, USA)
Arkaitz Zubiaga (University of Warwick, UK)