SCI faculty members and a PhD candidate are involved with three projects that recently received Pitt Cyber Accelerator Grants. These grants provide support for projects that aim to establish or reinforce Pitt as a place of distinction and excellence in cyber studies and practice.
Assistant Professor Adriana Kovashka, Professor Diane Litman, Professor Rebecca Hwa, Assistant Professor Malihe Alikhani, and Associate Professor Yu-Ru Lin are working on a project titled "Influencing Detection through Multimodal Discourse and Vividness Analysis," which aims to pilot the methods and ideas for extracting or completing agendas, detecting concerns and emotions, and modeling different types of vividness.
Assistant Professor Malihe Alikhani, Clinical Associate Professor Dmitriy Babichenko, and PhD candidate Patrick Healy are working on a project titled "Modeling the Effect of Disinformation on COVID-19 Vaccination Discourse in Online Social Networks," which aims to investigate and model how disinformation propagates through online social networks and how it affects discourse and beliefs related to COVID-19 vaccination topics.
Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Rosta Farzan is working on a project titled "Framework for Qualitative Research into Social Media and Misinformation: A Relational/Ecosystemic Approach." This project aims to develop protocols for conducting qualitative research into the dynamics of disinformation in social media spaces, ensuring that research is transparent, ethical, and documented in ways that are consistent with data privacy as well as academic disciplinary standards.
Congratulations to everyone on these exciting projects!
Learn more about the Spring 2021 Pitt Cyber Accelerator Grant recipients.