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As we gather for this meeting physically dispersed and virtually constructed let us take a moment to reflect the meaning of place and doing so recognise the various traditional lands on which we do our business today.

We acknowledge the Elders – past, present and emerging of all the land we work and live on and their Ancestral Spirits with gratitude and respect.

Acknowledgement of Country​

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Agenda

Session #1: Opening (1:00PM -1:40PM), Chair by Xiao

  • Welcome address by Prof. Bas Baskaran, Pro Vice-Chancellor International Research Partnership, Deakin University 
  • Opening speech by Dr. Ika Dewi Ana, Vice Rector for Research and Community Service, UGM. 
  • Welcome speech by Ms. Caroline Hartnett, Deputy Director, International Education, Global Victoria 
  • Project progress report by Research Co-Lead, Associate Professor Jianxin Li (Deakin) and Dr. Hilya Mudrika Arini (UGM)  

Session #2: Keynote (1:40pm – 2:40pm), Chair by Jianxin and Hilya 

  • Keynote Speech by Prof. Xiuzhen Jenny Zhang, Associate Dean Higher Degree Research, School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University
  • Keynote Speech by Dr. Usman Kansong, General Director of Public Communications and Information, Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Indonesia

Afternoon Tea Break (2:40pm: 20 mins)

  • Keynote Speech by Dr. Henry Nguyen, ARC DECRA Fellow, Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems, Griffith University

Session #3:  Panel Discussion (3:40pm – 4:30pm), Chair by Hilya

Panellists: Prof. Robert Ackland (ANU), A/Prof. Xiao Liu (Deakin), A/Prof. Jianxin Li (Deakin), Ms. Okky Irmanita (Kiroyan Partners), Ms. Ika Krismantari (The Conversation)

Conclusion: 4:30pm

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Welcome Address

Prof. Bas Baskaran,

Pro Vice-Chancellor International Research Partnership, Deakin University, Australia  

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Opening Speech

Dr. Ika Dewi Ana

Vice Rector for Research and Community Service

Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia

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Welcome Speech

Ms. Caroline Hartnett

Deputy Director, International Education

Global Victoria, Australia

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counterinfodemic.org

Fighting against global misinformation on COVID-19 to early detect multi-lingual fake news and mitigation.

Project Progress Report

Jianxin Li, Deakin University

Hilya Mudrika Arini, Universitas Gadjah Mada

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PARTNERSHIPS

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Deakin University’s School of Information Technology has world class research capacity in cybersecurity, distributed computing and artificial intelligence.

Gadjah Mada University is one of the oldest and largest institutions of higher education in Indonesia and has well-established networks and partnerships with various industry/government institutions, which provides excellent research and commercialisation opportunities.

Study Melbourne is a Victorian Government initiative providing support and information to this community of international students, helping them have the best possible time while studying and living in Victoria

Veski was established in 2004 to enhance Victoria’s intellectual capital through a program of fellowships, awards and international networks. Veski is at the forefront of Australia’s innovation economy.

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UGM

Dr. Hilya Mudrika Arini

Dr. Yun Prihantina Mulyani

Rian Febrianto

Nurul Lathifah

Dr. Achmad Pratama Rifai

Dr. Titis Wijayanto

Deakin

A/Prof. Xiao Liu

Dr. Hui Yin

Mr. Oscar Wu

Dr. Xiangyu Song

A/Prof. Jianxin Li

Project Team

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OUTLINE

10

  • Project Background
  • Project Missions
  • Dataset Collection and Workflow
  • Current Research Output
  • Project Website Publishing

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Background

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BACKGROUND – Fake news detection

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  • Social media platforms have become the main stream channel to spread fake news, including fraud information, misinformation, narrow opinion information.
  • Applications of detecting covid-19 fake news can reduce panic buying, minimize non-compliance with health policies, and provide positive opinions for COVID tests and vaccination.
  • Limitation of existing studies: single language models, and mainly focused on English-based content.

A General Framework for Fake News Detection

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BACKGROUND- Covid-19 Fake news detection

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Fake news was produced in various languages to spread more widely across linguistic groups

Fact-checkers’ rapid responses against misinformation

The public misled by unverified rumors on COVID-19

COVID-19 misinformation tweets circulating

COVID-19 pandemic is currently spreading across the world at an alarming rate

Individual

Multi-lingual

Public Engagement

Fact-Checking Services

Social Media Platform

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Project Missions - 3 missions

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Mission 1

Generate Public Dataset

To collect and analyse the data in Australia and Indonesia regarding individual online behaviour characteristics in COVID-19 news propagation and communication.

Mission 2

Multilingual Model Design

To conduct theoretical analysis about the existing fake news detection models, and design a multilingual COVID-19 fake news detection model using advanced machine learning techniques.

Mission 3

Fake News Intervention

To apply the proposed COVID-19 fake news detection method into the process of risk communication management to intervene in the spread of fake news, and help authoritative organisations to generate their customised COVID-19 warning policies.

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Mission 1.1: Online Survey - What we are doing

Conduct online survey of Indonesian and Australian residents to analyze the correlation of people trust level toward the information obtained with the ease of detecting fake news. 

From the survey, we collect the information about respondents’ profile, perspectives about Covid-19 in general, level of confidence and trust of Covid-19 during Covid-19 era, and perspectives about Covid-19 news spread in the media, whether it is fake news or real news.

750

Indonesian respondents

750

Australian respondents

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Online Survey - What we have done

 

Will start to distribute questionnaire to Australian residents soon.

  • Building code for crawling twitter data
  • Running code for scrawling data from twitter + collecting from other social media
  • Cleaning data from pointer
  • Collecting hoax news from turnbackhoax + covid19 (government website)
  • Collecting real news from website's portal

For online survey

For dataset

 

 

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Mission 1.2: DATA COLLECTION

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  • Collected COVID19 fact-checking news spreading all over the world
  • Constructed auto-crawler for fact-checking websites across different languages
  • Extracted relevant social media posts from fact-checking articles.

The general data collection process for fake news detection tasks

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DATA COLLECTION

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30,000+

Fact-checking Covid-19 news

37+

Languages

100+

Fact-checking websites

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COLLECTING WORKFLOW

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Defined a list of auto-crawler for various fact-checking websites of specific languages

Collected verified COVID19 news from fact-checking websites

Extracted related social media links (actual tweets) from html format in article webpages

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Current Research Output

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  • Hui Yin, Yutao Wu, Jianxin Li, Hilya Mudrika Arini, Xingjun Ma and Xiao Liu. COVID-19 Misinformation Detection: A Comprehensive Survey. Submitted to Health Information Science and Systems.

  • Xiao Huang, Siqin Wang, Mengxi Zhang, Tao Hu, Alexander Hohl, Bing She, Xi Gong, Jianxin Li, Xiao Liu, Oliver Gruebner, Regina Liu, Xiao Li, Zhewei Liu, Xinyue Ye, Zhenlong Li. Social media mining under the COVID-19 context: current progress, available sources, challenges, and our paths forward. Submitted to International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation

  • Hui Yin, Xiangyu Song, Shuiqiao Yang, Jianxin Li. Sentiment analysis and topic modeling for COVID-19 vaccine discussions. World Wide Web (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-022-01029-y

  • Hui Yin, Shuiqiao Yang, Jianxin Li: Detecting Topic and Sentiment Dynamics Due to COVID-19 Pandemic Using Social Media. ADMA 2020: 610-623.

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Current Research Output - Example

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Hui Yin, Xiangyu Song, Shuiqiao Yang, Jianxin Li. Sentiment analysis and topic modeling for COVID-19 vaccine discussions. World Wide Web (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-022-01029-y

Prevalent words in tweets from India

Prevalent words in tweets from USA

Prevalent words in tweets from Canada

Prevalent words in tweets from England

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Thanks and Questions

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For more information, please visit our project website counterinfodemic.org

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Keynote Speech

Prof. Xiuzhen Jenny Zhang

Associate Dean Higher Degree Research

School of Computing Technologies

RMIT University, Australia 

Combating misinformation on the social media: from early detection to effective mitigation

Xiuzhen (Jenny) Zhang is Professor of Data Science at School of Computing Technologies,  RMIT University. She specialises in data mining and machine learning,  text mining and social media data analytics. She has published over 100 papers in these areas. Her research has been supported by the Australian Research Council, Australian and Victorian governments,  as well as industry partners. She is an associate editor of the journal Information Processing and Management. She obtained her PhD from The University of Melbourne. 

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Keynote Speech

Dr. Usman Kansong

General Director of Public Communication and Information Ministry of Communications and Information Technology Indonesia

Fake News Detection and Intervention

Dr. Usman Kansong is Director General  of Public Communication and Information in the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Indonesia. Prior his current role, he was a Chairman of Editorial Board and a News Director in Media Group. He obtained his Ph.D. in Communication Studies in University of Indonesia.  

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Afternoon Tea Break for 20mins

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Keynote Speech

Dr. Henry Nguyen,

ARC DECRA Fellow

Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems

Griffith University, Australia

Helping Media to Fight Fake News and Restore the Public Trust

Dr. Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung is a senior lecturer at Griffith University and an ARC DECRA Fellow. He earned his PhD degree from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (Switzerland). His research interest focuses on Information Systems, Social Media Analytics, Data Visualisation, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Cyber Defence, with special emphasis on web data, social data and IoT data.

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Panel Discussion

Prof. Robert Ackland School of Sociology & VOSON Lab

The Australian National University, Australia

A/Prof. Jianxin Li

Co-Director of Smart Networks Data Lab School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Australia 

Ms. Okky Irmanita Media Specialist, Kiroyan Partners, Indonesia 

Ms. Ika Krismantari Head of Editorial

The Conversation Indonesia

A/Prof. Xiao Liu

Associate Head of School – International School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Australia

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Question#1: What is your most impressed COVID-19 fake news?

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Question#2: What is the role of academia and media in fighting COVID-19 infodemic?

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Question#3: What is the next agenda in fighting COVID-19 infodemic based on your role in the academia and media?

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Open Discussion

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Workshop Conclusion

Project website:

https://counterinfodemic.org/

Questionnaire: 

Bahasa version: http://ugm.id/ugmxdeakin

English version: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/COVID19fakenews

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Thanks for your participation!

Look forward to seeing you again in our next event!