Our Work Is Local, but Our Impact Is Global

Older adults are especially vulnerable to believing and circulating disinformation online, and we want to enable this population to use social media more responsibly.

Traditional long-term research projects share results with participants at the end of a study, but oftentimes the information they receive is too little, too late. To address that, Whole CommunitiesWhole Health is developing an interactive smartphone app that will translate raw data collected during the study into actionable, real-time information.

AI-based technologies used by cities and organizations have been shown to exhibit racial bias, and yet, they can determine who gets access to employment, care, and adequate housing.

This project designs and prototypes new ways to find, interpret, and evaluate online information with the goal of helping to combat rampant misinformation. It studies how people evaluate and integrate information from disparate online sources, focusing on fact-checking as it relates to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This project examines how human-centered approaches to assess bias and fairness can address a critical gap to inform research on algorithmic fairness. 

The rise of social media and the growing scale of online information has led to a surge of intentional disinformation and incidental misinformation. It is increasingly difficult to tell fact from fiction, and the challenge is more complex than simply differentiating fake news from simple facts.

Spanning across a wide range of climatic regimes, Texas relies on water extracted from rivers and aquifers within its own borders. Climate change and population growth are adding unprecedented stress on Texas waters and other types of natural resources.

This project examines the temporal dynamics of emotional appeals in Russian campaign messages used in the 2016 election on Facebook and Twitter. 

The DOLCe (Digital Object Life Cycle) project is a collaboration between University of Texas Libraries, Texas Advanced Computing Center, and the Texas Digital Library to develop a necessary infrastructure component to facilitate the publication and preservation of data from Planet Texas 2050 and other Bridging Barriers projects.

The Whole Communities–Whole Health team has built and tested a smart device that uses environmental sensors to better understand how indoor air quality affects family health by measuring indoor air pollution, carbon dioxide levels, humidity, and temperature in real-time.