Ph.D XXXVII

Supervisor: Stefano Mizzaro

Room: A2 31

Mail: labarbera.david@spes.uniud.it

Research Project

Human-In-The-Loop Systems to Fight Misinformation

Misinformation (widely known as fake news, a term we use to identify inaccurate information shared via Web) has been increasingly affecting our society during recent years. Misinformation spreads faster and reaches more audience than any other kind of information. Also, misinformation affects human decision-making process. Furthermore, the ability to target individual users allows to create customized false content making it even more difficult to identify false information in real time. Misinformation is unlikely to disappear soon and needs to be addressed effectively. Since there is an ever-increasing amount of people involved in online communication, false claims should be identified quickly to avoid their diffusion.

My research project copes with misinformation detection and assessment. In detail, during my PhD I will develop a Human-In-The-Loop system, which will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to process a large amount of data, while relying on human intelligence (mainly in a crowdsourcing scenario, where an individual obtains services from a large group of participants, called crowd, giving a reward in exchange) to perform complex tasks and to include explainable properties into the system. Indeed, AI techniques require a great amount of data for the training phase and their reliability, effectiveness, and explain- ability are often not adequate.