Research Blog

My research concentrates on computational models of social and information trust, especially in networked scenarios. I (or sometimes my students) occasionally find time to discuss a certain paper in more depth. These posts are linked on this page.

NELA Toolkit and Dataset

To help researchers as well as consumers of today's complex news and media landscape, we need many tools and broad based datasets. To this end, we have developed and published both a toolkit in WWW 2018 and two datasets (NELA2018 in ICWSM 2019 and NELA2017 in ICWSM 2018).

This just in: fake news packs a lot in title, uses simpler, repetitive content in text body, more similar to satire than real news

In an earlier content based analysis of news and media sources (ICWSM NECO Workshop 2017), we found some significant stylistic differences between sources publishing misinformation and mainstream journalistic sources. For example, fake news sources do not often use clickbait titles because their main objective is not to get clicks but to form opinions in readers through their titles. (Media: ScienceNews). This medium blog post by my student Ben Horne explains this work quite nicely:

Book on Trust Context in Networks

We make complex decisions every day, requiring trust in many different entities for different reasons. These decisions are not made by combining many isolated trust evaluations. Many interlocking factors play a role, each dynamically impacting the others. In this brief, "trust context" is defined as the system level description of how the trust evaluation process unfolds. Purchase on Amazon.

Software and Data

Links to all significant software and data from my research group is available here.

Older Blog Posts

Some of the older research is described in this list of blog entries.