Event description forthcoming, you can learn more about the speakers and discussants now. This roundtable is part of the Institute for Historical Studies' theme in 2020-2021 on "Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented."

Tara Zimmerman (Postdoctoral fellow, School of Information) will present on "Social Noise: How Relationships Influence the Spread of Disinformation. " Email goodsystems@austin.utexas.edu to request the meeting information.

In this talk, Yueyue Fan will share a new error estimation method for identifying systematic errors for sensors deployed in a traffic network.  This approach integrates statistics and transportation domain knowledge, specifically the spatial interdependence of traffic flows, to enable identification of the health conditions of road sensors as well as correction of the biased data. Dr. Yueyue Fan is a professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Davis.  She is currently serving as the program director of the Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) program at the National Science Foundation.  Her research is on transportation and energy infrastructure systems modeling and analysis, with special interest in integrating applied mathematics and engineering domain knowledge to address challenges brought by system uncertainty, dynamics, and indeterminacy issues. Part of the Smart Cities Consortium.

COGSEC will be a two-day, virtual event March 4-5 focusing on practical skills related to investigating and thwarting media manipulation and disinformation campaigns online.

The online conference will serve as a forum for sharing what works and what doesn’t, for piecing together knowledge about the state-of-the-art tactics being used by malicious actors in the field, and for building the ethical norms of security research in this domain.  COGSEC will feature practical workshops on hunting and neutralizing online influence campaigns. We welcome students, scholars, journalists, activists, NGO professionals, and anyone with an interest in the real-world tools and techniques being used to deal with media manipulation threats in the field.

Registration is now open!

The Austin AI Housing Analysis is a Year 2 Good Systems Project that aims to build a predictive AI system that can test past and future regulatory scenarios and help inform affordable residential development policies in Austin. This talk will cover preliminary research to date into how affordable housing in Austin has changed over time and how developmental policies over the past several decades have both encouraged and discouraged affordable housing differently throughout the city. Junfeng Jiao is an associate professor in the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the chair of UT Good Systems Grand Challenge, chair of the Smart City Bridging Discipline Program, and director of the Urban Information Lab. Junfeng’s research focuses on urban informatics and machine learning, particularly how different technologies come together to create smart cities and how those affect people’s behaviors. He coined the term of “transit desert” and measured it in all major U.S. cities. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the NSF, the Department of Transportation, the Texas Department of Transportation, the Washington Department of Transportation, UT Austin, Intel, and Google and reported by popular national media outlets such as ABC, Associated Press, CNN, CityLab, Fox News, NBC, NPR, New York Times, and Wired. He received his doctorate in urban planning and design from the University of Washington. Josh Conrad is a doctoral candidate in the School of Architecture studying new GIS methodologies for building and landscape research. He is currently a data researcher with the Urban Information Lab as well as with UT Libraries. His doctoral research studies the history and future of equity-oriented GIS data practices in historic preservation. Additionally, he works professionally as a data consultant with the historic preservation firm HHM & Associates in Austin. Part of the Smart Cities Consortium.

Ahmer Arif (Assistant Professor, School of Information) will sharing his work on: "Troubling matters:  Examining the spread of misinformation and disinformation on social media during mass disruption events." Email goodsystems@austin.utexas.edu to request the meeting information.

Matt Lease (Associate Professor, School of Information) will lead the first research presentation from the Future of Work Research Focus Area. Social media platforms must detect and block a variety of unacceptable user-generated content, such such as adult or violent images. This detection task is difficult to automate due to high accuracy requirements, costs of errors, and nuanced rules for what is and is not acceptable. Consequently, platforms rely on a vast and largely invisible workforce of human moderators to filter such content. However, mounting evidence suggests that exposure to disturbing content can cause lasting psychological and emotional damage to some moderators. To mitigate such harm, we investigate a set of blur-based moderation interfaces for reducing exposure to disturbing content whilst preserving moderator ability to quickly and accurately flag it. We find that interactive blurring designs can reduce emotional impact without sacrificing moderation accuracy and speed. See our online demo at: http://ir.ischool.utexas.edu/CM/demo/.   Register now!