Wang research group receives ASONAM Best Paper Award

Dong Wang
Dong Wang, Associate Professor
Lanyu Shang
Lanyu Shang

A paper coauthored by PhD student Lanyu Shang and members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, received the best paper award in the research track during the 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2022). The conference, which was held in Istanbul, Turkey, on November 10-13, brings together researchers and practitioners from a broad variety of social media-related fields to promote collaborations and exchange of ideas and practices.

Their paper, "A Knowledge-driven Domain Adaptive Approach to Early Misinformation Detection in an Emergent Health Domain on Social Media," addresses an important problem of how to accurately detect misinformation in emergent health domains, where existing misinformation detection solutions often fall short in training effective classification models due to the lack of sufficient training data and up-to-date medical knowledge.

"In our study, we observe that misinformation from the emergent health domain of Monkeypox is often relevant to topics in recent news, such as COVID-19. For example, a popular misleading post in the Monkeypox domain claims that the Monkeypox virus is intentionally engineered for the financial interest of vaccine sale like COVID-19," the researchers noted. "While such misinformation cannot be easily detected solely with our previous knowledge about the Monkeypox disease, our COVID-19 knowledge, such as the COVID-19 virus is not engineered, can be of great help for debunking the above Monkeypox misinformation."

Inspired by the above observation, the researchers explored the rich and timely resources, such as the annotated data and medical reports, from a relevant health domain, namely COVID-19, to tackle the early misinformation detection problem in the emergent health domain of Monkeypox. According to the researchers, through experiments on multiple real-world datasets, the proposed framework was shown to be effective in identifying emergent healthcare misinformation in an early stage.

The authors believe that their work could also be applied to detect health misinformation related to other emergent health domains, such as polio, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), or any diseases in the future. The accurate and timely misinformation detection results can effectively mitigate the spread of online misinformation related to emerging diseases and ensure the credibility of information on social media.

The primary research focus of the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab lies in the emerging area of human-centered AI, AI for social good, and cyber-physical systems in social spaces. The lab develops interdisciplinary theories, techniques, and tools for fundamentally understanding, modeling, and evaluating human-centered computing and information (HCCI) systems, and for accurately reconstructing the correct "state of the world," both physical and social.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

iSchool researchers work with diverse groups to improve user experience

iSchool faculty are studying ways to improve user experience, with a common goal of improving technology and applications for the needs of individual users. These researchers are working with diverse groups to gain feedback, and several current projects are focused on experiences for users with disabilities.

Das receives student membership award from ASIS&T

PhD student Puranjani Das has been selected as a recipient of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) SIG CMR Student Membership Award for the 2024-2025 academic year. She will receive a complimentary one-year membership in both ASIS&T and SIG CMR, a special interest group focused on classification and metadata research.

Puranjani Das

Kim defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Jenna Kim successfully defended her dissertation, "Evaluating Pre-Trained Language Modeling Approaches for Author Name Disambiguation," on June 11, 2024.

Jenna Kim headshot

Desai defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Smit Desai successfully defended his dissertation, "Designing Metaphor-fluid Voice User Interfaces," on June 10.

Smit Desai

Student says ‘thank you’ with a helicopter ride

Last month, Michael Ferrer showed appreciation for one of his MSIM instructors in a unique way—by inviting him for an insider’s look at his work as a reservist in the Illinois Army National Guard. For the ILARNG BOSS Lift, which took place on June 18 at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, Ferrer selected Michael Wonderlich, iSchool adjunct lecturer and senior associate director of business intelligence and enterprise architecture for Administrative Information Technology Services (AITS) at the University of Illinois.

Michael Wonderlich and Michael Ferrer hold a U of I flag in front of a military helicopter