Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a global declining trust in major institutions including governments, media, and each other. Many believe that the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and polarized narratives in cyberspace had a great impact on the deteriorated public trust. In particular, social media extends the capabilities of sophisticated targeting of information campaigns and diffusion of manipulated views. To better understand the cyber-social phenomena, I will present a series of measurement studies that characterize social media users' engagement in misinformation and hyper-partisan topics. These studies reveal the characteristics of the vulnerable online population in misinformation consumption, the structural advantages of information campaigns, and the connections between online engagement and offline risk in public health and violence. This line of research helps reveal new opportunities to support online at-risk users and to recommend timely interventions to mitigate offline risks.

Bio: Yu-Ru Lin is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh, where she directs the PITT Computational Social Dynamics Lab (PICSO LAB). Her research lies at the intersection of Computational Social Science, Data Mining, and Visualization. She specializes in using social network and text data along with statistical learning tools and social theories to study phenomena spanning societal events and policy, anomalous behaviors, and other crucially important complex patterns concerning collective attention and actions, as well as human and social dynamics in response to societal risks. Her work has appeared in prestigious scientific venues and has been featured in press including WSJ, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, MIT News, and NPR. She has authored or coauthored more than 100 refereed journal and conference papers and served on more than 50 conference program committees in the areas of big data, network science, and computational social science. She has served as a chair/co-chair of leading computational social science, web mining, and social media conferences such as AAAI ICWSM and TheWebConference/WWW (Web & Society Track). She currently serves as an Editor-in-Chief of AAAI ICWSM and an Associate Editor for multiple journals including PLOS ONE, Springer EPJ Data Science, and Nature's Scientific Reports. She was selected as a Fellow of Kavli Frontiers of Science, National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Her research has received funding from the industry such as Amazon and Adobe, and government agencies including NSF, DARPA, and AFOSR. Additional information can be found at: http://www.yurulin.com/.