Data Debates: AI and Fake News

Fake news is fuelling rising public mistrust of the media, politics and big business, with even health services subject to conspiracy around life-saving vaccines and other treatments. What role does AI play in creating and disseminating fake news and how can we harness the same technologies to counteract them.

Our panel of experts include:

Alex Krasodomski-Jones Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, leading work on digital political extremism, information environments, disinformation and machine-enabled decision-making. He manages CASM’s visual analytics capability, and provides written and televised comment for the BBC, CNN, the Spectator, the Huffington Post and other outlets.

Yulan He is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Warwick. Her research centres on the exploration of statistical models in representing uncertainty and the benefit they bring over earlier work in a wide range of application areas, particularly the integration of machine learning and natural language processing for text understanding. Some of her interested research topics include sentiment analysis and opinion mining, topic/event extraction from text, combining language and vision for multimodal analysis, clinical text mining, conversational agents and social media analytic

Bertie Vidgen, Turing

Dr Bertie Vidgen is a researcher on two of the Alan Turing Institute's projects, The (Mis)Informed Citizen and Hate Speech: Measure and Counter-measures. His main research is focused on detecting, analysing, and countering online hate speech, examining it in the context of both news and social media. In his work, he primarily uses computational social science methods, including machine learning, natural language processing, and statistical modelling.

Chaired by writer and broadcaster Timandra Harkness. Timandra presents BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofing and has presented the documentaries, Data, Data Everywhere, Personality Politics & The Singularity.

The discussions are encouraged to continue more informally, over a glass of wine (included), once the formal debate finishes.

Enjoy food and drink purchased from the Knowledge Centre Bar from 18.30 and after the event until the Bar closes at 22.00

Data Debates is a collaboration between The Alan Turing Institute and the British Library and aims to stimulate discussion on issues surrounding big data, its potential uses, and its implications for society.