Algorithmic Detection of Fake News
The scale and frequency with which information can be distributed on social media makes the problem of fake news a rapidly metastasizing issue. To do any content filtering or labeling demands an algorithmic solution.
In today's episode, Kyle interviews Kai Shu and Mike Tamir about their independent work exploring the use of machine learning to detect fake news.
Kai Shu and his co-authors published [Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective](https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.01967), a research paper which both surveys the existing literature and organizes the structure of the problem in a robust way.
Mike Tamir led the development of [fakerfact.org](https://www.fakerfact.org/login), a website and Chrome/Firefox plugin which leverages machine learning to try and predict the category of a previously unseen web page, with categories like opinion, wiki, and fake news.
Guests
Kai Shu: Kai Shu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Emory University. His research lies in machine learning, data mining, social computing with applications such as healthcare, security and education. Prior to joining Emory in 2024, he was the Gladwin Development Chair Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science at Arizona State University, under the supervision of Professor Huan Liu. He is the recipient of ACM SIGKDD 2026 Rising Star Award, 2025 Emory URC Research Award, 2024 NSF CAREER Award, 2024 IIT College of Computing Dean's Excellence in Research Award, 2023 Microsoft Accelerate Foundation Models Research Award, 2023 DARPA AI Forward Scholarship Award, 2023 AAAI New Faculty Highlights, multiple Cisco Faculty Research Awards, the finalist of a 2022 Meta Research Award, and 2020 ASU Dean's Dissertation Award. He interned at Microsoft Research AI, Yahoo Research and HP Labs. His research is generously supported by federal agencies such as NSF, DARPA, IARPA, DHS, and DOE, as well as industrial collaborators such as Cisco, Google, and Microsoft.
Mike Tamir