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Recent social networks&#39; misinformation mitigation approaches tend to investigate how to reduce misinformation by considering a whole-network statistical scale. However, unbalanced misinformation exposures among individuals urge to study fair allocation of mitigation resources. Moreover, the network has random dynamics which change over time. Therefore, we introduce a stochastic and non-stationary knapsack problem, and we apply its resolution to mitigate misinformation in social network campaigns. We further propose a generic misinformation mitigation algorithm that is robust to different social networks&#39; misinformation statistics, allowing a promising impact in real-world scenarios. A novel loss function ensures fair mitigation among users. We achieve fairness by intelligently allocating a mitigation incentivization budget to the knapsack, and optimizing the loss function. To this end, a team of Learning Automata (LA) drives the budget allocation. Each LA is associated with a user and learns to minimize its exposure to misinformation by performing a non-stationary and stochastic walk over its state space. Our results show how our LA-based method is robust and outperforms similar misinformation mitigation methods in how the mitigation is fairly influencing the network users.

AAAI 2022

Socially Fair Mitigation of Misinformation on Social Networks via Constraint Stochastic Optimization

**ICWSM-2022 will be held from June 6th – 9th in a hybrid format, both in-person in Atlanta, Georgia and online.**

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The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.


ICWSM, now in its sixteenth year, has become one of the premier venues for computational social science, and previous years of ICWSM have featured papers, posters, and demos that draw upon network science, machine learning, computational linguistics, sociology, communication, and political science. The uniqueness of the venue and the quality of submissions have contributed to a rapidly growing conference, and a competitive acceptance rate of approximately 20% for full-length research papers published in the proceedings by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).


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ICWSM 2022

The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.

Recent social networks' misinformation mitigation approaches tend to investigate how to reduce misinformation by considering a whole-network statistical scale. However, unbalanced misinformation exposures among individuals urge to study fair allocation of mitigation resources. Moreover, the network has random dynamics which change over time. Therefore, we introduce a stochastic and non-stationary knapsack problem, and we apply its resolution to mitigate misinformation in social network campaigns. We further propose a generic misinformation mitigation algorithm that is robust to different social networks' misinformation statistics, allowing a promising impact in real-world scenarios. A novel loss function ensures fair mitigation among users. We achieve fairness by intelligently allocating a mitigation incentivization budget to the knapsack, and optimizing the loss function. To this end, a team of Learning Automata (LA) drives the budget allocation. Each LA is associated with a user and learns to minimize its exposure to misinformation by performing a non-stationary and stochastic walk over its state space. Our results show how our LA-based method is robust and outperforms similar misinformation mitigation methods in how the mitigation is fairly influencing the network users.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

My doctoral research focuses on understanding semantic knowledge in neural network models trained solely to predict natural language (referred to as language models, or LMs), by drawing on insights from the study of concepts and categories grounded in cognitive science. I propose a framework inspired by 'inductive reasoning,' a phenomenon that sheds light on how humans utilize background knowledge to make inductive leaps and generalize from new pieces of information about concepts and their properties. Drawing from experiments that study inductive reasoning, I propose to analyze semantic inductive generalization in LMs using phenomena observed in human-induction literature, investigate inductive behavior on tasks such as implicit reasoning and emergent feature recognition, and analyze and relate induction dynamics to the learned conceptual representation space.

On Semantic Cognition, Inductive Generalization, and Language Models

Artificial Intelligence has aimed to give the systems or agents, the ability to learn, perceive, recognize, plan, reason and act. Affective Computing has brought into focus the importance of giving AI systems, the capability to perceive, detect, utilize and generate emotion, affect, sentiment or feelings. To have a meaningful human-computer interaction, we need to design and develop a more socially intelligent and affective AI. My doctoral research goal is to delve deeper into some of these aspects, firstly by surveying computational models implemented in AI that uses emotion in decision-making or behaviour; secondly, by creating new model to predict social event context and affect in group videos; thirdly, to predict the social identities in visual scenes; and lastly to combine information about context, identities, behaviour and emotion in a social interaction scene to predict social incoherence and to recommend appropriate behaviour.

Socially Intelligent Affective AI

Named Entity Recognition models perform well on benchmark datasets but fail to generalize well even in the same domain. The goal of my th    esis is to quantify the degree of in-domain generalization in NER, probe models for entity name vs. context learning and finally improve     their robustness, focusing on the recognition of ethnically diverse entities and new entities over time when the models are deployed.

Towards Robust Named Entity Recognition via Temporal Domain Adaptation and Entity Context Understanding

The entertainment industry, as well as the field of Computer Graphics, frequently faces the issue of creating large virtual crowds that would populate a scene. One of the ways to achieve that, particularly with modern rendering techniques, is by using simulation -- this, however, is nontrivial to design and control. The main goal of my PhD work is working towards the creation of a tool enabling the creation of virtual crowds that one can interact with, and we believe the best way to that is through Multiagent Reinforcement Learning techniques. These animated crowds can then be used both in movies and video games. Especially for the latter, it is highly desirable that both the crowd as a whole, as well as the individual characters, can react to the user's input in real time.

Creating Interactive Crowds with Reinforcement Learning

This study focuses on the Nesterov's accelerated quasi-Newton (NAQ) method in the context of deep neural networks (DNN) and its applications. The thesis objective is to confirm the robustness and efficiency of Nesterov's acceleration to quasi-Netwon (QN) methods by developing practical algorithms for different fields of optimization problems.

On the Practical Robustness of the Nesterov’s Accelerated Quasi-Newton Method

Contextual word representations generated by language models learn spurious associations present in the training corpora. Adversaries can exploit these associations to reverse-engineer the private attributes of entities mentioned in the training corpora. These findings have led to efforts towards minimizing the privacy risks of language models. However, existing approaches lack interpretability, compromise on data utility and fail to provide privacy guarantees. Thus, the goal of my doctoral research is to develop interpretable approaches towards privacy preservation of text representations that maximize data utility retention and guarantee privacy. To this end, I aim to study and develop methods to incorporate steganographic modifications within the vector geometry to obfuscate underlying spurious associations and retain the distributional semantic properties learnt during training.

Interpretable Privacy Preservation of Text Representations Using Vector Steganography

My work studies the problem of generating scenarios to evaluate interaction between humans and robots. I expect these interactions to grow in complexity as robots become more intelligent and enter our daily lives. However, evaluating such interactions only through user studies, which are the de facto evaluation method in human-robot interaction, will quickly become infeasible as the number of possible scenarios grows exponentially with scenario complexity. Therefore, I propose automatically generating scenarios in simulation to explore the diverse possibility space of scenarios to better understand interaction and avoid costly failures in real world settings.

Towards Automating the Generation of Human-Robot Interaction Scenarios

My PhD research focus is to produce a critical review of literature in Algorithmic Impact Assessment (AIA) and to develop an AIA tool that can be used to evaluate potential unintended impact of AI systems.

Dynamic Algorithmic Impact Assessment to Promote an Ethical Use of AI in Businesses

Recently, explanation methods have been proposed to evaluate the predictions of Graph Neural Networks on the task of link prediction. Evaluating explanation quality is difficult without ground truth explanations. This thesis is focused on providing a method, including datasets and scoring metrics, to quantitatively evaluate explanation methods on link prediction on Knowledge Graphs.

Evaluating Explanations of Relational Graph Convolutional Network Link Predictions on Knowledge Graphs

Broadly speaking, I hope to dedicate my PhD to improving our understanding of algorithmic economics with the ultimate goal of building welfare improving decentralized technology for markets. In the following pages, I describe how my past work has built on the existing literature to get closer to the goal of creating such technologies, and describe what research paths this work opens up for the rest of my PhD. I believe that my research has the potential to provide algorithmic solutions to problems in machine learning, optimization, and game theory, and can be used to improve the efficiency of online marketplaces.

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