NOTE: I have funded many undergraduates as research assistants, but NOT until after they have first spent time working with my lab to prove their commitment and competence, via volunteering and/or an independent study for course credit. Do not expect to be paid before you have proven your commitment and ability to contribute to advancing research. About the lab: https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/research/labs/ir-crowdsourcing-lab Fighting Fake News: PDF: https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ml/papers/nguyen-uist18.pdf Demo: http://fcweb.pythonanywhere.com/ Video: https://youtu.be/TlY_Acr7gYs Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/mattlease/believe-it-or-not-designing-a-huma… * Anubrata Das, Kunjan Mehta, and Matthew Lease. *CobWeb: A Research Prototype for Exploring User Bias in Political Fact-Checking*. In ACM SIGIR Workshop on Fairness, Accountability, Confidentiality, Transparency, and Safety in Information Retrieval (FACTS-IR), 2019. [pdf (https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.03718) | conference-website (https://facts-ir-2019.hotcrp.com/) ] * Nguyen et al. *Believe it or not: Designing a Human-AI Partnership for Mixed-Initiative Fact-Checking*. In Proceedings of the 31st ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST), pages 189--199, 2018. [ pdf, demo, slides above -- sourcecode (https://github.com/thanhan/uist18) ] * An Thanh Nguyen, Aditya Kharosekar, Matthew Lease, and Byron C. Wallace. *An Interpretable Joint Graphical Model for Fact-Checking from Crowds*. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-18), pages 1511--1518, 2018. [pdf (https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ml/papers/nguyen-aaai18.pdf) | sourcecode (http://github.com/thanhan/fc-aaai18) ] * Matthew Lease. *Fact Checking and Information Retrieval*. In Proceedings of the 1st Biannual Conference on the Design of Experimental Search & Information REtrieval Systems (DESIRES), pages 97--98, 2018. [ pdf (https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ml/papers/lease-desires18.pdf) | conference-website (http://desires.dei.unipd.it/) | slides (https://www.slideshare.net/mattlease/fact-checking-information-retrieval) ] * Qiwei Li. *Clickbait and Emotional Language in Fake News*. Bachelor's thesis, University of Texas at Austin, Department of Computer Science, 2019. [ pdf (https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ml/papers/li2019-thesis.pdf) ]
For back-end work (algorithms), comfort with programming (eg python) and using statistics. For front-end work (interface, user experience), comfort in design and front-end programming technologies.
Work with graduate students and/or professor to implement and benchmark statistical algorithms. Expected to maintain weekly contact. Hours can be varied, depending on time available, but must commit to at least one semester of work to justify our time teaching and training you. Depending on prior skill and experience, degree of supervision and sophistication tasks will be tailored accordingly. You will be expected to document your research activities in writing, with the opportunity to publish a technical report or research at the end.
