Keynote Speaker
27 November 2024Stefano Mizzaro
Professor, University of Udine, Italy
Stefano Mizzaro is a full professor at the Department of Mathematics, Informatics, and Physics of the University of Udine.
He has been working for more than 30 years on information retrieval, mainly focusing on effectiveness evaluation. More recently he has also worked on crowdsourcing, artificial intelligence, and misinformation assessment.
On these topics he has published more than 150 scientific papers in national and international venues, he has received some grants and awards, and he is currently coordinating the national project “MoT – The Measure of Truth: An Evaluation-Centered Machine-Human Hybrid Framework for Assessing Information Truthfulness”.
Keynote Speech: The Truth of Crowds? On Using Crowdsourcing Against Misinformation
The phenomenon of misinformation spreading can be explored from many different angles. One key countermeasure is fact-checking, i.e., the process of verifying facts. This involves several activities, with a critical one being the assessment of the truthfulness of the examined information. Traditionally, this task has been performed by expert journalists within established organizations. However, the vast volume of misinformation has created a pressing need to scale up truthfulness assessment.
To address this challenge, various approaches have been proposed, including automated classification methods based on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning. Another promising approach is crowdsourcing. Indeed, leveraging the so-called wisdom of crowds by outsourcing truthfulness assessment to a diverse crowd of non-expert workers could be the right compromise between the effectiveness of expert evaluations (accurate but slow) and the efficiency of automated methods (fast but less accurate).
In this presentation, I will share my seven-year journey of research into using crowdsourcing for identifying misinformation. Starting from early efforts, I will summarize the experiments conducted, the results obtained, and the lessons learned. Finally, I will discuss potential directions for future research.