Curbing Misinformation: Information extraction, categorisation and visualisation for COVID-19 news using NLP unsupervised techniques

Seminar Abstract

Misinformation can amplify humanity's greatest challenges.

A salient recent example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has bred a multitude of falsehoods even as truth has increasingly become a matter of life and death; people share false claims about COVID-19, in part, because they simply fail to think sufficiently about whether or not content is accurate when deciding what to share (Pennycook, et al., 2020). 

Members of the research project (EBS and LAMFO) in partnership with Microsoft (AI for Health) elucidate the context in which the project was conceived and discuss breathy about the motivation and objectives about the topic of disinformation during COVID-19.

Through data e.g. coming from the population (crowdsourcing) it is possible to identify patterns of behaviour that indicate information bubbles and systematic misinformation replication.

Text mining and machine learning techniques are applied in this project to bring insight that can help in this by extracting meaningful information from the huge volume of data that is being generated around the pandemic.

Booking

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Speaker bios

Dr Maged Ali

Dr Maged Ali is a senior lecturer of Digital Marketing at Essex Business School, University of Essex. 

Dr Ali has achieved a multidisciplinary research background in Marketing and Information Technologies. He has been a visiting lecturer at several universities in the UK and abroad including Brazil.

He is a member of editorial committees of several journals, as well as co-and-mini track chair of many international conferences.

Dr Ali has edited special issues for a variety of peer reviewed journals and published his scholarly work in well-established journals; Journal of Social Change and Forecasting, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Technology and People, Journal of Computer and Human Behaviour, Journal of Marketing Management, among others.

Dr Ali has also secured many research funds including a research project with Microsoft, to tackle the misinformation around COVID-19 using NPL (US$ 61,766)

Dr Joao Gabriel de Moraes Souza

Dr Joao Gabriel de Moraes Souza has received his degree in Economics from the University of Brasilia (2010), Postgraduate in Controllership and Finance from IBMEC / DF (2003), Master's degree from postgraduate programme in administration - PPGA / UnB area of concentration in Finance and Quantitative Methods (2016) and a PhD by the postgraduate programme in administration - PPGA / UnB (2020). 

He is a research fellow at the Institute of Applied Economic Research / Ipea. He has also been a substitute Professor in the Management Department at the University of Brasilia and a visiting professor of Mackenzie Presbyterian College and Coordinator of the modelling and statistics team of the research partnership between the University of Brasilia, Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology and the National Telecommunications Agency (UnB, IBICT, ANATEL, 2019).

Lucas Moreira Gomes

Mr Lucas Moreira Gomes is a last-year student in Production Engineering at the University of Brasilia.

He is currently a member of the Project Management Office at the Brazilian Institute of Science and Technology Information (IBICT) and Business/Strategy Coordinator at the UnB Machine Learning Laboratory in Finance and Organisations (LAMFO).

He is also developed research on artificial intelligence and natural language processing with Anatel (National Telecommunications Agency), Ipea (Institute of Applied Economic Research), LAMFO and I3GS (International Institute of Intelligence in Management and Sustainability)

Dr Herbert Kimura

Dr Herbert Kimura graduated in Electronic Engineering from Technological Institute of Aeronautics (ITA), he has a Masters in Statistics from the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Sao Paulo and a doctorate in Administration from the Faculty of Economics, Administration and Accounting at the University of Sao Paulo. 

Dr Kimura also has a PhD in Business Administration from the Sao Paulo State School of Fundacao Getulio Vargas and PhD in Statistics from the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Sao Paulo.

He has worked research and consultancy projects and training programmes in financial institutions, non-financial companies and public organisation such as

• Abamec,
• Anbima,
• Apimec,
• Banco BBA-Creditanstalt
• Banco Itau
• Banco Santander
• Banco Unibanco
• BankBoston
• HSBC Republic
• Informix
• Ministry of Science Technology Innovations and Communictions
• Ministry of Finance

As well as many others.

Dr Kimura was a Professor at Mackenzie Presbyterian University (UPM) and EAESP / FGV.

He is a full Professor at the University of Brasilia, having been coordinator of the Scientific and Technological Park and the Multincubator Programme of Companies at the University of Brasilia between 2003 and 2017.

He has experience in the area of Administration, Statistics and Engineering with emphasis on Finance, Data Analytics and Innovation, acting mainly on the following themes;

• risk management
• innovation assessment
• date science
• machine learning
• artificial intelligence 

He was the first Brazilian scientific editor certified by the Council of Scientific Editors). He is risk manager certified as a Financial Risk Manager by the Global Association of Risk Professionals and as a Professional Risk Manager by the Professional Risk Manager's International Association.