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, “Anti-Social Computing: Bots, Lies, and the New Information Environment.”

The March 9 panel, held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, can be viewed as free webcast.

The roundtable explored how fake news can spread and the role of different types of actors in creating, spreading, countering, and monitoring such news.

“The panel is extremely propitious, especially now when misinformation is rampant in social media and has the potential to affect what people think and believe,” Agarwal said. “I 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.”

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:

•      Kathleen Carley, professor of computation, organizations, and society and the center director for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems in the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University
•      Huan Liu, professor of computer science and engineering at Arizona State University
•      Rand Waltzman, senior information scientist at RAND Corporation and former acting chief technology officer of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University

For more information, visit the South Big Data Hub website.