CS Department Seminar: Kai Shu (Illinois Institute of Technology)
Combating Disinformation on Social Media and Its Challenges
Abstract: In recent years, disinformation and fake news have become a global phenomenon,
particularly so during the pandemic, COVID-19. The wide dissemination of fake news can have
detrimental societal effects on individuals and the society. Despite the recent progress in
detecting fake news, it remains a challenging task due to its complexity, diversity, multi-
modality, speed, and costs of fact-checking or annotation. In this talk, we look at some
challenges and lessons learned when exploring effective and explainable detecting strategies of
fake news, and discuss challenges in fake news research and the need for interdisciplinary
research.
Bio:Dr. Kai Shu is a Gladwin Development Chair Assistant Professor in the Department of
Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology since Fall 2020. He obtained his Ph.D. in
Computer Science at Arizona State University. He was the recipient of the 2020 ASU
Engineering Dean’s Dissertation Award, 2021 Google Cloud Research Credits Award, 2021
Finalist of Meta Research Faculty Award, 2022 Cisco Research Faculty Award. His research
addresses challenges varying from big data, to social media, and to trustworthy AI on issues on
fake news detection, social network analysis, cybersecurity, and health informatics. He is the
leading author of a monograph, Detecting Fake News on Social Media (2019), and the leading
editor of a book, Disinformation, Misinformation, and Fake News in Social Media (2020). He has
published innovative work in highly ranked journals and top conference proceedings such as
ACM KDD, SIGIR, WSDM, WWW, CIKM, IEEE ICDM, IJCAI, and AAAI. More can be found at
Web Site: http://www.cs.iit.edu/~kshu/.
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-6bAV2cAAAAJ&hl=en