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Around the iSchool
FACULTY NOTE
CCDS Researchers Receive Awards from Twitter, WhatsApp A pair of researchers from the iSchool’s Center for Computational and Data Science (CCDS) have received awards from two prominent social media platforms to closely examine the nature of discussions on each network.
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DISCUSSION QUALITY ON TWITTER Professor Jennifer Stromer-Galley and Postdoctoral Researcher Patricia Rossini are part of an interdisciplinary team selected by Twitter to conduct research and develop metrics to help identify behaviors that are threatening to the quality of the discussions on the platform. In addition to Syracuse University, other institutions participating include Leiden University, Delft University of Technology, and Bocconi University. Over 230 proposals were reviewed in the selection process, and the team was one of two chosen to receive a Twitter research grant.
The team brings together scholars with different backgrounds and expertise, bridging political science, communication, and computer science to develop metrics and conduct experiments aimed at identifying potentially problematic behaviors on Twitter.
Led by Rebekah Tromble, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University in the Netherlands, the team will conduct research comparing discussions around polarized and non-polarized topics in the United States and United Kingdom to develop and implement four metrics that will provide a better understanding of how communities form around discussions on Twitter and will investigate the extent of certain problems that may develop in those discussions. Tromble was a visiting scholar at CCDS from January through August 2017. Postdoctoral Researcher Patricia Rossini (left) and Professor Jennifer Stromer-Galley at WhatsApp headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., where they met with company researchers on a new project to study how the messaging application is used in discussions about politics and elections.
The project focuses on two challenges faced by Twitter. The first is the presence of echo chambers — that is, the extent to which discussions are enclaved in homogeneous, and often polarized, groups.
The second area of research will explore uncivil and intolerant discourse. These metrics will examine the extent to which those who participate in Twitter discussions engage in toxic behaviors. “Political discussion online is often dismissed due to uncivil discourse, and because of that we are sometimes unable to understand its true value. Rather than lumping all problematic discourse into a single category, we distinguish between uncivil and intolerant statements. Incivility online might serve an important and valid purpose in discourse, while intolerance is, by its nature, threatening to democracy,” explains Rossini, whose research focuses on understanding such discourse online.
As part of the research grant, the team will work closely with Twitter. While scholars will have the autonomy to develop and publish research under this grant, the outcomes of this project will help inform Twitter’s future policies and practices to promote a healthy conversational environment.
“We would like to find out how users understand what they receive, how they determine whether to trust the sender of the information, and what motivates them to forward information to other individuals or groups.” —PATRICIA ROSSINI, POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHER
ELECTION-RELATED MISINFORMATION ON WHATSAPP Rossini and Stromer-Galley have also received a WhatsApp Misinformation and Social Science Research Award to examine election-related misinformation, specifically focusing on information sharing, political engagement, and discussion in the 2018 Brazilian elections. Rossini serves as principal investigator on the award.
WhatsApp can be a powerful medium for political discourse and engagement. But at the same time, it can also be misused to share political information that is inaccurate or inflammatory. The company is interested in understanding this space both from the perspective of political actors and voters as well as understanding how they might take steps to prevent the misuse of the platform in electoral processes. WhatsApp received nearly 600 proposals, and selected 20 research teams to examine issues that include problematic content; digital literacy and misinformation; electionrelated misinformation; and network effects and virality.
Joining the CCDS researchers on this project are two academics from Brazil’s Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Erica Anita Baptista and Vanessa Veiga de Oliveira. The research team’s mixed-methods study aims to understand two interconnected issues. First is the potential impact of the use of WhatsApp by political campaigns and the ways users experience the platform and receive political information. Second is the extent to which WhatsApp users actively engage and share content related to the elections within their peer groups and how they evaluate the credibility and the reliability of political information circulating through the platform. “We want to figure out the different and creative ways that people are using WhatsApp for political activities, both for sharing of news and information around political issues as well as discussion of these topics,” said Rossini. “We’ve conducted quite a bit of social media research, but up to this point that research has only looked at public sites like Facebook and Twitter, where a user’s audience is mostly public.”
With WhatsApp, users have a better understanding of their audience and with whom they are messaging and sharing information.
“It’s a private channel, a different kind of social media where most users know exactly who their audience is,” Rossini explained. “And we think that people will behave differently in these private spaces. We can expect that people might feel more comfortable talking with an audience that they are familiar with, or with whom they share the same views.”
Rossini and her team are also interested in how WhatsApp users put the information they receive via the platform into context.
“Users on WhatsApp don’t tend to share a lot of links, so there’s very little context that comes when you receive a message,” she said. “We would like to find out how users understand what they receive, how they determine whether to trust the sender of the information, and what motivates them to forward information to other individuals or groups.”
“Our end goal is to be able to better understand how people use WhatsApp for political purposes, and then to help WhatsApp better understand the affordances these users need to better use the platform, as well as to understand the extent to which users engage with misinformation,” said Rossini. n
Daniel Acuna
FACULTY NOTE
NSF Grant Will Allow Acuna to Study Optimization of Scientific Peer Review Process D eficiencies in the scientific community’s centralized peer review process can impact more than a researcher’s career. Faults in the process can ultimately affect the kinds of scientific discoveries that are made, the distribution of information about findings, the technology innovations that do — or don’t — result, and even the economic impact of scientific research work.
With that premise and a goal and plan to improve the process, Assistant Professor Daniel Acuna has attracted a $531,339 grant from the National Science Foundation.
For the next three years, he and two co-researchers will determine ways to optimize scientific peer review by creating a better understanding of the factors that affect the process and developing insights and plans to improve it. Acuna is the principal investigator for the project. He is working with coprincipal investigators Konrad P. Kording, Penn Integrated Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and James A. Evans, Director of Knowledge Lab, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Computational Social Science program at the University of Chicago. Acuna explains that some researchers have found that the scientific community’s centralized peer review process can be slow and low-quality, while other studies have quantified biases in the process, such as prejudices against certain ideas and inconsistencies in opinions from different groups of peers. Those deficiencies can delay or shorten the dissemination of important research, he says. Such issues also can have larger effects, and not simply on the careers of scientific researchers. More broadly, those issues can affect the types of research that gets done, thus the direction science takes, plus the emergence of technology innovations and even the impact of scientific research on the economy.
“This grant can help illuminate one of the oldest and perhaps least understood aspects of how modern scientific knowledge is disseminated,” Acuna says. “Several research groups have shown that scientists can be against novel ideas or ideas produced by distant scientific relatives. Moreover, scientists can be inconsistent, judging essentially similar pieces of work wildly differently. These problems percolate into the peer review system and can be exacerbated by its anonymity. We hope to address some of these issues.”
In its scope, the research analyzes factors that affect peer review outcomes and uses those to improve reviewer selection. Ultimately, plans call for the development of software that will help optimize reviewer assignments and evaluate the resulting models. The analysis is being done in the real-world context of a scientific journal, major scientific conferences, and massive open, online courses (MOOCs).
In its first phase, the project will quantify problems in bias, variance, timing, and quality of reviews, then identify bias as attributed to author and reviewer (such as age, gender, minority status, and visibility and centrality within the field). The second phase of research consists of assessing techniques to estimate the characteristics of potential reviewers. Then, the study will use that information to propose a review panel that is balanced in terms of reviewer choice, timing, and quality of the process. In the last segment, the study will test the techniques that automatically assign reviewers and analyze the output of the process. n
iSCHOOL NEWS
44 Projects Showcased at iSchool’s First Research Day
Atotal of 44 research projects under study by iSchool faculty and doctoral and master’s-level students were showcased for fellow researchers and associates at the first iSchool Research Day held in October.
Organized by doctoral students Mahboobeh Harandi and Sarah Bratt, in conjunction with iSchool Associate Dean for Research Kevin Crowston, the half-day function was designed to set aside space and time to generate greater awareness of the topics iSchool faculty and students are investigating. It also offered them a chance to share their research ideas, obtain feedback about their approaches and find potential new collaborators.
Participants presented 27 posters and conducted 17 table discussions, and 63 people attended the event, according to Harandi.
Based on the good turnout and high degree of interest and engagement by participants, Crowston said he’d certainly like to see Research Day conducted again next year. It was a good way to engage students in research activity as well as have others learn more about iSchool research initiatives overall, he noted. Crowston was particularly gratified by the high level of participation and attendance by master’s-degree students, he said, since attracting graduate students to conduct research work is an ongoing goal.
Having posters and discussions on display in three separate, hour-long sessions illustrated both the breadth of topics under study as well as detailed focal points of researchers’ efforts, the organizers reported.
Doctoral student Harandi regards the first-time event as successful. “I think having the space and the time for informal intellectual discussions about our research has helped people achieve what they were looking for. I can see people interacting and talking about their research, and I can just hear their enthusiasm as they talk about their projects,” she observed at the session. First-year doctoral student Subhasree Sengupta said the event provided some practical personal benefits, too. It was chance for her to articulate her research question to varied audiences, examine how her interests may overlap with what other researchers are doing and obtain feedback on her communication techniques, she noted. “It’s a good way to break you in, in [regard to] my presentation and to see what parts people will ask you about, what parts people are questioning, and to see what works and doesn’t work.”
Among the attendees was Syracuse University Vice President of Research Zhanjiang (John) Liu. His presence and the university-level attention it represented was greatly appreciated, according to doctoral student Bratt. “It strengthens the priority of research not only within the school, but across the campus, because we got to talk to him about infrastructure important to research. His being here was a symbol that we’re more unified as a campus moving forward,” she said.
Of the 44 projects presented, topics included: reviews of “lost” links in scientific articles, the evolution of information systems, Bluetooth beacons, viral diffusion of political topics on social media, designing privacy mechanisms and tailoring recruiting language for citizen science participation. Other topics included: methods of studying distributed work, the study of data rights, crowdsourced reasoning, “IT Culture” theory, argument mining on Reddit, data science team conclusion and development, organizing peer review, open deep learning models and a study of technology use. n
Ph.D. student Sarah Bratt (right) talks about her research project with fellow doctoral student Jennifer Sonne at the iSchool’s first Research Day event. J.D. ROSS
STUDENT NOTE
iSchool Team Takes First Place in IBM Call for Code Hackathon A team of graduate students from the iSchool took the top prize at the IBM Call for Code Hackathon held at the Blackstone LaunchPad on the Syracuse University campus in September.
The event was part of IBM’s global Call for Code initiative, a charge to developers to create solutions that significantly improve preparedness for natural disasters and relief in their aftermath to safeguard the health and well-being of communities.
The five students from the iSchool’s Information Management and Applied Data Science programs formed a team and pitched the idea of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DR-a-a-S) to help execute a disaster relief plan in a transparent and fast way. Team members included Shubham Bhatia G’19, Aditya Chauhan G’19, Shama Kamat G’19, Anmol Handa G’19, and Alan Nguyen G’20. The winning team at IBM’s Call for Code Hackathon event. From left to right in the black shirts are graduate students Shama Kamat G’19, Shubham Bhatia G’19, Aditya Chauhan G’19, Alan Nguyen G’20, and Anmol Handa G’19.
— ANMOL HANDA, STUDENT, M.S. IN INFORMATION MANAGEMENT PROGRAM
The team initially found their inspiration from an article published by the American Red Cross that reported on scams associated with relief funds after natural disasters.
“The article on the issues with disaster recovery and relief funds motivated us to design a Blockchain platform using Hyperledger to have all parties or donors on a single platform to contribute towards the cause,” explained Anmol Handa, a student in the M.S. in Information Management program. “We think this kind of platform would help speed the execution of a disaster relief campaign by bringing all for-profit and non-profit organizations together on one platform to reduce the mismatching of supplies like food, first aid, and clothing using programmable smart contracts.”
The future scope of the project includes plans to incorporate machine learning algorithms to predict the occurrence of any natural disaster with a ‘Disaster Score’ beyond a threshold limit that triggers notifications requesting all the organizations on the Blockchain platform to assist.
“Our iSchool courses on Blockchain Management, Cloud Management, and Big Data Analytics helped us a lot in implementing the idea,” said Handa. “And the experiential learning opportunities offered by the iSchool also
prepared us to execute and build a platform in a much more efficient way.” As they worked on the project, the team members began to think about how emerging technology has the power to change how society can respond in disaster and crisis situations.
“It helped us to think beyond the horizon and understand the importance of technology and the ways it can be beneficial for society,” said Handa. “Technology can be the spark that transforms limiting systems and extends economic opportunity to those marginalized populations desperately in need of it. Natural disasters are one important area which desperately needs the attention of the larger community to reduce the impact on lives and the money involved in it. Through this competition, we got exposure to tools like IBM Watson, Chat Bot Engine, IBM Blockchain, and many others which are bridging the gap between a problem and a solution.” n
iSCHOOL NEWS
New Minor in Data Analytics Offered A s the demand for data analytics professionals grows, organizations across all industries are investing in analytics positions, and it is predicted that demand for data science and analytics expertise across many different job roles will increase rapidly in the coming years.
A recent report co-published by IBM and analytics software company Burning Glass Technologies estimates that data science and analytics job openings will grow 15 percent by 2020.
In order to prepare students for a future career that will require a high degree of data literacy and skills, the iSchool introduced a new undergraduate minor in Data Analytics in Fall 2018. This 18-credit program provides students with an analytical and technical background as well as a foundational understanding of the role of data in today’s society.
“A minor in data analytics adds a new dimension to a student’s skills and can open up opportunities in their major’s professional field,” explains Deb Nosky, Professor of Practice and Undergraduate Program Director at the iSchool. “For example, a biology major could begin a career in bioinformatics, or a political science major could become a leading pollster and political strategist. This minor allows students to expand their potential in their field of study.”
As businesses hire to fill a demand for data analytics knowledge, they will turn to their own ranks for the skills to meet their data needs. “Holding a minor in Data Analytics indicates an interest in this growing field,” notes Nosky, “and this offers potential for growth beyond just getting your first job out of college.”
“Every industry is in need of graduates with big data and analytics skills,” says Nosky. “The versatility of Data Analytics makes it a great minor option for students in any major at Syracuse University.”
There are nine credits of required courses for the minor, with the remaining courses coming from a choice of six elective offerings, including coursework in data mining, information visualization, and human-computer interaction. Students with any non-iSchool major from any school or college within Syracuse University can pursue this minor. n
Visitors’ Center Opens in Hinds Hall A new space has been created in Hinds Hall to serve as a front door for prospective students visiting the iSchool.
The iSchool Visitors’ Center is located on the first floor, directly across from the Student Services Office, in an ideal location to capture the attention of tours passing through the lobby on a daily basis.
Staffed by iSchool Assistant Director of Undergraduate Recruitment Stephanie Worden and her team of undergraduate peer advisors, the center includes a meeting space for prospective students and their families, and a reception area stocked with drinks and snacks. “We’ve outfitted the room with some comfy couches and seating, and decorated it in a way that allows it to serve as a warm, welcoming space for visitors and a reception area for any guests seeking to learn more about the iSchool,” said Worden. “With peer advisors at the ready to take students on a tour, or offer their firsthand accounts of student life, it really allows us to showcase the school and our curriculum in a very positive light, and make a good first impression on visitors.”
Comfortable seating and available snacks make the new first-floor Visitors’ Center a welcoming place, as IM&T Program Director/Professor of Practice Deborah Nosky, left, and Assistant Director of Undergraduate Recruitment Stephanie Worden, show.
