IIIT-Delhi announces ambitious two-year research partnership with social enterprise AI platform, Logically, to improve detection of online misinformation
Logically, a social enterprise using advanced AI to tackle misinformation, and Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology – Delhi (IIIT-D), a leading research-orientated state university with a specialism in computer science, have launched an ambitious two-year research partnership that will explore the provenance, motivations and psychology of misinformation shared online.
The partnership will combine IIIT-D’s leading AI research capabilities and Logically’s industry leading technological expertise, with the aim of developing practical applications to improve how society can identify and impede misinformation and disinformation. The research also aims to address how to better identify those who share misinformation online, their motivations, networks and communities, and more accurately predict what type of false content will go viral before it’s shared at scale. The ambition is to use the findings of the research to develop a state-of-the-art early warning system for widespread misinformation campaigns that will slow or stop its spread.
The partnership is an ambitious collaboration of firsts. For Logically, it is the first academic partnership the company has embarked upon and the first time Assistant Professor Dr. Tanmoy Chakraborty, who will be leading the team of researchers at IIIT-D, has personally partnered with a private company outside of India.
Assistant Professor, Dr. Tanmoy Chakraborty, Director of Laboratory for Computational Social Systems (LCS2) will lead a team of researchers specializing in computational social science dedicated to this programme including a PhD assistant specialising in Natural Language
Processing (NLP) with an aim to develop novel approaches for in-depth insights about online misinformation. Logically’s team of data scientists will be supervised by Dr. Anil Bandhakavi, the company’s Head of Data Science, who will lead the efforts to productionise the research outcomes. Logically is also providing technical and financial support to IIIT-D to support the delivery of this research programme.
Dr Anil Bandhakavi, Head of Data Science at Logically, said: “We are thrilled that our first academic partnership is with such a prestigious institute as IIIT-D. We are confident that the combination of skill sets will result in a truly ground-breaking piece of research with significant real world applications. I have no doubt that it will have both a hard hitting and positive impact on how we mitigate the spread of misinformation and disinformation.”
Dr Tanmoy Chakraborty, Assistant Professor, IIIT-D, said: “We are looking forward to working with Logically and excited about what our partnership can achieve. Over the past few years, our lab, LCS2 at IIIT-D has been impressed by its progress in tackling misinformation and disinformation in the public sphere, and know that together we will achieve great things. Disinformation campaigns are becoming more and more prolific in India, and we are hopeful that our findings will go some way towards solving the problem.”
