Fast Deployment of AI-based Disinformation Detector

Principal Investigator: 
Ruoxi Jia, assistant professor, electrical and computer engineering, and faculty at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, Virginia Tech

Co-Principal Investigators: 
Jia-Bin Huang, assistant professor, electrical and computer engineering, and faculty at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics; Adrienne Ivory, associate professor, communication; both Virginia Tech

Project Description: 
Responding rapidly to disinformation attacks is critical to minimizing the damage caused by these attacks. As fake news is intentionally written to mislead readers during a short time period, it is difficult for a human editor to differentiate between real and fake news. For this project, researchers plan to enable fast deployment of artificial intelligence (AI)-based disinformation detection tools. To do so, researchers must build a large set of training data to train the AI-based detection tool. Researchers will create techniques to strategically label valuable data by looking at different sets of features such as new content, user profiles, message propagation, and social context while learning from this information and mitigating the effects of potential labeling noise on detection models. In addition, the researchers will evaluate public opinion about AI-based detection methods because a better understanding of public perception can help inform social media companies about using disinformation detection to block content.