WB-IIT KGP-AWARD

IIT KGP faculty wins Facebook award for research in targeted
media bias
    Kolkata, Sep 28 (PTI) An IIT Kharagpur professor has
been named for Ethics in AI Research Award, which is part of
Facebook's initiative, for his project dealing with bias in
Indian media.
    Animesh Mukherjee, Associate Professor at the Computer
Science and Engineering department, has been selected for the
Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Award in the
'operationalizing ethics' category for his project "Targeted
Bias in Indian Media Outlets", an IIT KGP statement said on
Saturday.
    The award is part of Facebook's initiative to
encourage research on AI ethics and address intricate
challenges and complex ethical questions in the AI domain, the
statement said.
    The award-winning project which is part of a
collaborative work with Prof Pawan Goyal and PhD student
Souvic Chakraborty, deals with the issue of fake news.
    Mukherjee, who has been working in the areas of AI,
big data analytics and information retrieval, has arrived at a
solution in leveraging available information on online
published media "to predict fake news or identify bias in a
news media article," the statement said.
    "One of the major challenges in this work is
formulating something as abstract as 'bias' in a quantifiable
manner," he remarked.
    The team had collected 20-years' data of three
national media outlets and quantified bias on three metrics -
coverage bias, word choice bias and topic choice bias.
    The team further plans to extend the reach of their
study to local and digital media outlets.
    On the future roadmap of this project, Mukherjee said
they have plans to develop browser extensions to show bias
score in real time.
    As India crosses the half a billion smartphone users'
mark, it is more important than ever to characterize
information available online through automatic algorithms and
auto-updating knowledge bases to restrict the spread of
falsehood, the statement said. PTI SUS
NN NN

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)