Kai Shu | |
---|---|
Occupation(s) | Computer scientist, academic and author |
Awards | NSF Career Award |
Academic background | |
Education | Bachelor of Engineering Master of Science in Computer Science PhD in Computer Science |
Alma mater | Chongqing University Arizona State University (ASU) |
Thesis | Understanding Disinformation: Learning with Weak Social Supervision (2020) |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Illinois Institute of Technology |
Kai Shu is a computer scientist,academic,and author. He is an assistant professor at Emory University. [1]
Shu's research explores big data,social media,and trustworthy AI,focusing on detecting fake news,analyzing social networks,enhancing cybersecurity,and investigating health informatics;he also holds three patents for his contributions. [2] [3] He is the lead author of Detecting Fake News on Social Media,and the lead editor of Disinformation,Misinformation,and Fake News in Social Media. He has received the NSF CAREER Award, [4] the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention by Aminer, [5] the Google Cloud Research Credits Award,and the College of Computing Dean's Excellence in Research Award from Illinois Tech. [6]
Shu completed his Bachelor of Engineering in Network Engineering from Chongqing University in 2012 and later obtained a Master of Science in Computer Science and Technology from the same institution in 2015. He then got his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Arizona State University in 2020 under the supervision of Huan Liu,where he completed his dissertation on "Understanding Disinformation:Learning with Weak Social Supervision." [7]
Shu was Research Intern at Hewlett-Packard Labs in China,under the mentorship of Ping Luo,from 2012 to 2013. [8] Following this,he served as a Research Visiting Scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China for a year in 2015,then joined Yahoo Research in California [8] as a Research Intern in 2018 and subsequently moved to Microsoft Research as a Research Intern in 2019. [9]
Shu transitioned to his first academic role in September 2015 where he served as a Research Assistant at the Arizona State University,till July 2020. [10] From 2020 tp 2024,he held the position of Gladwin Development Chair Assistant Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. [11] In 2024,he move to Emory University as an assistant professor. [1]
Shu's research areas include machine learning, [12] data mining,and social computing [13] with applications such as disinformation, [14] education,and healthcare. [15]
Shu's research on social media focused on the phenomenon of news consumption's popularity despite lower quality and increased fake news,stressing the importance of grasping the correlation between user profiles and fake news for future research. [16] Highlighting social media's dual role as both a gateway to information and a channel for misinformation,he advocated for sophisticated algorithms utilizing user engagement data to combat the spread of false information. [17] In his 2019 book,Detecting Fake News on Social Media,he covered concepts such as detection methods and challenging issues. His subsequent work,Disinformation,Misinformation,and Fake News in Social Media,published in 2020,provided an overview of disinformation,offering insights into user engagements,detection techniques,and emerging ethical and technological considerations. Furthermore,he and his co-authors introduced TriFN,an approach aimed at mitigating the challenge of fake news proliferation on social media,leveraging social context—such as relationships among publishers,news pieces,and users—to enhance fake news detection compared to existing methods. [18]
In related research,Shu introduced an explainable fake news detection method that outperformed existing approaches by utilizing a sentence-comment co-attention sub-network,providing better insights into why certain news pieces are deemed fake. [19] To address the prevalent fake news issue,his study presented FakeNewsNet,a repository containing two datasets with diverse features,aiming to facilitate research on fake news detection and analysis on social media platforms. [20]
Shu's research delved into how the public utilized large language models (LLMs) for healthcare purposes as well,revealing their popularity for medical Q&A and self-diagnosis and highlighting LLMs' role in enhancing information quality,reducing misinformation,and optimizing convenience in accessing healthcare information,especially regarding their use by doctors for diagnosis. [21] He also discussed how instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained for AI safety alignment but face vulnerability in their alignment,posing potential harm. [22]
Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. Disinformation is an orchestrated adversarial activity in which actors employ strategic deceptions and media manipulation tactics to advance political,military,or commercial goals. Disinformation is implemented through attacks that "weaponize multiple rhetorical strategies and forms of knowing—including not only falsehoods but also truths,half-truths,and value judgements—to exploit and amplify culture wars and other identity-driven controversies."
Fact-checking is the process of verifying the factual accuracy of questioned reporting and statements. Fact-checking can be conducted before or after the text or content is published or otherwise disseminated. Internal fact-checking is such checking done in-house by the publisher to prevent inaccurate content from being published;when the text is analyzed by a third party,the process is called external fact-checking.
Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. Misinformation can exist without specific malicious intent;disinformation is distinct in that it is deliberately deceptive and propagated. Misinformation can include inaccurate,incomplete,misleading,or false information as well as selective or half-truths. In January 2024,the World Economic Forum identified misinformation and disinformation,propagated by both internal and external interests,to "widen societal and political divides" as the most severe global risks within the next two years.
SIGKDD,representing the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining,hosts an influential annual conference.
Johannes Gehrke is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft focusing on AI. He is an ACM Fellow,an IEEE Fellow,and he received the 2011 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award and the 2021 ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award. From 1999 to 2015,he was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University,where at the time of his leaving he was the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science.
AMiner is a free online service used to index,search,and mine big scientific data.
Hsinchun Chen is the Regents' Professor and Thomas R. Brown Chair of Management and Technology at the University of Arizona and the Director and founder of the Artificial Intelligence Lab. He also served as lead program director of the Smart and Connected Health program at the National Science Foundation from 2014 to 2015. He received a B.S. degree from National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan,an MBA from SUNY Buffalo and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Information Systems from New York University.
Jie Tang is a full-time professor at the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University. He received a PhD in computer science from the same university in 2006. He is known for building the academic social network search system AMiner,which was launched in March 2006 and now has attracted 2,766,356 independent IP accesses from 220 countries. His research interests include social networks and data mining.
Filippo Menczer is an American and Italian academic. He is a University Distinguished Professor and the Luddy Professor of Informatics and Computer Science at the Luddy School of Informatics,Computing,and Engineering,Indiana University. Menczer is the Director of the Observatory on Social Media,a research center where data scientists and journalists study the role of media and technology in society and build tools to analyze and counter disinformation and manipulation on social media. Menczer holds courtesy appointments in Cognitive Science and Physics,is a founding member and advisory council member of the IU Network Science Institute,a former director the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research,a senior research fellow of the Kinsey Institute,a fellow of the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication,and a former fellow of the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin,Italy. In 2020 he was named a Fellow of the ACM.
Social media mining is the process of obtaining data from user-generated content on social media in order to extract actionable patterns,form conclusions about users,and act upon the information. Mining supports targeting advertising to users or academic research. The term is an analogy to the process of mining for minerals. Mining companies sift through raw ore to find the valuable minerals;likewise,social media mining sifts through social media data in order to discern patterns and trends about matters such as social media usage,online behaviour,content sharing,connections between individuals,buying behaviour. These patterns and trends are of interest to companies,governments and not-for-profit organizations,as such organizations can use the analyses for tasks such as design strategies,introduce programs,products,processes or services.
Bing Liu is a Chinese-American professor of computer science who specializes in data mining,machine learning,and natural language processing. In 2002,he became a scholar at University of Illinois at Chicago. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (1988). His PhD advisors were Austin Tate and Kenneth Williamson Currie,and his PhD thesis was titled Reinforcement Planning for Resource Allocation and Constraint Satisfaction.
A social bot,also described as a social AI or social algorithm,is a software agent that communicates autonomously on social media. The messages it distributes can be simple and operate in groups and various configurations with partial human control (hybrid) via algorithm. Social bots can also use artificial intelligence and machine learning to express messages in more natural human dialogue.
Huan Liu is a Shanghai-born Chinese computer scientist.
Jacob O. Wobbrock is a Professor in the University of Washington Information School and,by courtesy,in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science &Engineering at the University of Washington. He is Director of the ACE Lab,Associate Director and founding Co-Director Emeritus of the CREATE research center,and a founding member of the DUB Group and the MHCI+D degree program.
Deepfakes are images,videos,or audio which are edited or generated using artificial intelligence tools,and which may depict real or non-existent people. They are a type of synthetic media.
Animashree (Anima) Anandkumar is the Bren Professor of Computing at California Institute of Technology. Previously,she was a senior director of Machine Learning research at NVIDIA and a principal scientist at Amazon Web Services. Her research considers tensor-algebraic methods,deep learning and non-convex problems.
Wei Wang is a Chinese-born American computer scientist. She is the Leonard Kleinrock Chair Professor in Computer Science and Computational Medicine at University of California,Los Angeles and the director of the Scalable Analytics Institute (ScAi). Her research specializes in big data analytics and modeling,database systems,natural language processing,bioinformatics and computational biology,and computational medicine.
Jiliang Tang is a Chinese-born computer scientist and associate professor at Michigan State University in the Computer Science and Engineering Department,where he is the director of the Data Science and Engineering (DSE) Lab. His research expertise is in data mining and machine learning.
An audio deepfake is a product of artificial intelligence used to create convincing speech sentences that sound like specific people saying things they did not say. This technology was initially developed for various applications to improve human life. For example,it can be used to produce audiobooks,and also to help people who have lost their voices to get them back. Commercially,it has opened the door to several opportunities. This technology can also create more personalized digital assistants and natural-sounding text-to-speech as well as speech translation services.
Nitesh V. Chawla is a computer scientist and data scientist currently serving as the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He is the Founding Director of the Lucy Family Institute for Data &Society. Chawla's research expertise lies in machine learning,data science,and network science. He is also the co-founder of Aunalytics,a data science software and cloud computing company. Chawla is a Fellow of the:American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS),Association for Computing Machinery (ACM),Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence,Asia Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association,and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has received multiple awards,including the 1st Source Bank Commercialization Award in 2017,Outstanding Teaching Award (twice),IEEE CIS Early Career Award,National Academy of Engineering New Faculty Award,and the IBM Big Data Award in 2013. One of Chawla's most recognized publications,with a citation count of over 30,000,is the research paper titled "SMOTE:Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique." Chawla's research has garnered a citation count of over 65,000 and an H-index of 81.