Yu-Ru Lin, associate professor, and Adriana Kovashka, assistant professor, as well as Wen-Ting Chung, research assistant professor in the School of Education, have been awarded a RAPID Grant from the National Science Foundation for their project titled, “Countering COVID-19 Misinformation via Situation-Aware Visually Informed Treatment,” which aims to develop a debunking system for COVID-19 related misinformation.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the RAPID Grants have been awarded to research teams to “mobilize the scientific community to better understand and develop measures to respond to the virus.”
Using machine learning and data mining, the team will create an AI system that identifies which false information is most influential, who is most affected by it, and how to “debunk” the problematic information automatically in social media. Their debunking system will rely heavily on citizen journalism and crowdsourcing images that counter misinformation on Twitter.