Category Archives: Conferences

An EBU Webinar on Coordinated Networks

I’m very pleased to present our work on coordinated behavior at a webinar organized by The European Broadcasting Union – EBU.

This is the seventh edition of a series of monthly webinars about the veraAI project’s innovative research on AI-based fact-checking tools.

Join us on 30 April at 11:00 Geneva time to hear from Nicola Righetti from University of Urbino Carlo Bo, about their work on coordinated behaviour detection on social media.

For verification professionals and disinformation researchers, it is crucial not only to access existing verification data but also to identify and monitor the networks that may disseminate problematic content. This webinar will discuss ways to identify coordinated networks on social media, exemplified by the Coordinated Sharing Detection Service, a prototype for analysing and visualising social media activity through patterns of coordinated sharing. By uploading their data, users can explore and uncover networks of coordinated behaviour, offering actionable insights for diverse research and monitoring purposes. Key features include dynamic network visualisations, exploration of coordinated content, and downloadable outputs for further exploration.

This webinar, which targets anyone interested in the technological aspects of AI-based fact-checking, is open to EBU Members and Associates, as well as other media professionals.

The veraAI project is co-financed by the European Union, Horizon Europe programme, Grant Agreement No 101070093, with additional funding from Innovate UK grant No 10039055 and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract No 22.00245.

First AoIR Flashpoint Symposium

On June 24, 2019 the University of Urbino hosted the first AoIR Flashpoint Symposium. I am really happy to have contributed to the success of the event with the other members of the organizing committee.

The Flashpoint Symposium is a new format of academic meeting that, as the president of the Association of Internet Researchers Axel Bruns said, aims at responding  “more rapidly to the key issues of the day than conventional conferences, journals, and books are able to do”.

Title of the Flashpoint Symposium was “Below the Radar: Private Groups, Locked Platforms and Ephemeral Contents”. The focus of the event was on the problems researchers face in accessing social media data and on the issues of studying social media contents in an environment marked by an increasing number of ephemeral user generated contents.

The AoIR Flashpoint Symposium was kicked off with the keynote speech of the digital anthropologist Crystal Abidin, and closed by Rebekah Tromble.

Crystal Abidin presented a lot of engaging research materials and an interesting perspective on how the danah boyd’s concept of networked publics could be revisited in the light of the recent transformations of the Internet.

https://twitter.com/wishcrys/status/1143058449233784833?s=21

The closing keynote speech was delivered by Rebekah Tromble that addressed the issue of research ethics in a scenario where social media data are increasingly difficult for researchers to access, soliciting scholars to thinking critically on the social importance of research questions and on the ethics of data treatment and conservation.

https://twitter.com/NicRighetti/status/1143200382455287809

The AoIR Flashpoint Symposium was transmitted via live streaming and the video registration is available on the YouTube channel of the University of Urbino.

Axel Bruns wrote a live blog during the conference that can be read on his website. The website with the program of the conference can be accessed at the following link.

https://twitter.com/snurb_dot_info/status/1143087213560963072