Agarwal serves on roundtable covering trolls, bots, and fake news
Nitin Agarwal
A University of Arkansas at Little Rock information science professor was one of four experts to participate in a roundtable discussion that explored how trolls, bots, and other new phenomena are shaping conversations and shifting public discourse in an online environment.
Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy chair and professor of information science, participated in the South Big Data Hub Roundtable Series,The March 9 panel, held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, can be viewed as聽.The roundtable explored聽how fake news can spread and the role of different types of actors in creating, spreading, countering, and monitoring such news.鈥淭he panel is extremely propitious, especially now when misinformation is rampant in social media and has the potential to affect what people think and believe,鈥� Agarwal said. 鈥淚 spoke on the role of blogs in disseminating fake news and propagating misinformation. This is a very recent and a disturbing phenomenon that warrants scientific investigation to help journalism, democracy, and society in general.鈥�The panel was moderated by Lea Shanley, co-executive director of the South Big Data Hub at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Additional panelists included:
听听听听听Kathleen Carley, professor of computation, organizations, and society and the center director for in the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University
听听听听听Huan Liu, professor of computer science and engineering at Arizona State University
听听听听听Rand Waltzman, senior information scientist at RAND Corporation and former acting chief technology officer of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University
