The Department of Computer Science invites you to a seminar, titled “Check-it: Detecting fake news on Social Media” with George Pallis.
The explosive growth of fake news and its erosion to public trust increased the demand for fake news detection. As we access news from social media, we are exposed to a daily dose of false or misleading content. Search and social media platforms are working towards deploying countermeasures. In this line of work, we would like to fight disinformation using an automated approach. Our approach is inspired by the way we fight SPAM email messages. The system uses a variety of sources in order to decide whether a piece of news is misinformation. Such sources include: the reputation of the person (account) posting the news, the reputation of the web site where the news is hosted, natural language processing features that characterize a fake news article etc. Using a deep learning approach, we combine all these sources of signal into a tool that takes the form of a browser plugin, called Check-it. As the user surfs the Web and social media sites, the plugin continually analyzes the context and sources of information browsed. If the analysis detects disinformation with high probability, the user is alerted to that effect. It should be noted that our system is GDPR compliant since the plug in works locally on the user’s browser without the need of external communication. This work is funded by Google DNI (Digital News Initiative) and is performed in collaboration with Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH).
About George Pallis
George Pallis is assistant professor at the Computer Science Department, University of Cyprus and Associate Director of Laboratory of Internet Computing. His research interests include Cloud computing with focus on Cloud elasticity and monitoring, Edge Computing and Big Data Analytics. He is principal institutional investigator in research projects funded by EC, Research Promotion Foundation in Cyprus, and industry (e.g., Google) and has totally attracted more than 3.7M euro. Dr. Pallis has published over 70 papers in international journals, magazines and conferences and he is contributor of the first international DIN (German Institute for Standardization) SPEC standard. Dr. Pallis has served as PC-Co-chair of CloudCom 2018 and CCGrid 2019. He is Editor in Chief in the IEEE Internet Computing magazine, Associate Editor in the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, and Associate Editor in the Computing Journal. Dr. Pallis has also served in numerous Program and Organization Committees for international conferences and he received the best paper awards in the IEEE Big Data Conference (IEEE BIG DATA 2016) and the International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2014). Dr. Pallis’s papers have received more than 3500 citations (with h-index=20).
