Dr Kiran Garimella from the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT will be the speaker.
In this work, I will cover four aspects of our on-going research on WhatsApp. First, I will talk about our efforts to collect and analyze large amounts of public Whatsapp data from political groups in Brazil, India, and Indonesia. Second, I will discuss how such data could be useful for journalists, fact checking organizations and researchers, especially during high profile events like elections. Third, I will then take a deep dive into our work on studying image-based misinformation, showcasing novel ways images are being used to spread false information. Finally, I will mention potential solutions to tackle the misinformation problem on WhatsApp by enabling on-device fact checking and show how it works surprisingly well, even with a simple design. I will also show the effectiveness of WhatsApp’s decision to reduce the forwarding limits.
Dr Garimella is the Michael Hammer postdoc at the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT. Before joining MIT, he was a postdoc at EPFL, Switzerland. His research focuses on using digital data for social good, including areas like polarization, misinformation and human migration. His work on studying and mitigating polarization on social media won the best student paper awards at WSDM 2017 and WebScience 2017. Kiran received his PhD in computer science at Aalto University, Finland, and Masters & Bachelors from IIIT Hyderabad, India. Prior to his PhD, he worked as a Research Engineer at Yahoo Research, Barcelona, and QCRI, Doha.
