Two Ted Rogers School research projects awarded NSERC grants

Two researchers from the Ted Rogers School of Management have each been awarded prestigious Discovery Grants by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).

The recipients are Information Technology Management Assistant Professors Dr. Amira Ghenai and Dr. Zeinab Noorian.

NSERC promotes and supports discovery research based in the natural sciences and engineering.  Its Discovery Grants provide the core funding and freedom that enables Canada’s best researchers to pursue their most promising ideas and breakthrough discoveries.

Dr. Ghenai’s research project is called “The Effect of Online Harmful Content on People’s Attitudes.”  

During the last several decades, the spread of online harmful content has raised concerns by both the scientific community and the general public, often due to algorithmic bias issues and varying opinions of different online communities. The overall reaching goal of this research is to analyze the spread and effect of online harmful content on people's attitudes. In particular, the research will lead to improving current systems to be fairer, more accessible and generally less biased. 

The research plan is to target this problem from different angles, including studying online search behaviour in the presence of harmful content, analyzing potential implications of the spread of harmful content in social media platforms and understanding harmful content effects on specific age groups, i.e. people most vulnerable to such content. The proposed research will further provide ample opportunities for students to gain experience in multi-disciplinary areas, such as modeling and prediction of human behaviour, as well as large scale data processing. 

Dr. Noorian’s research initiative is called “Early detection of information campaign in social systems.” 

In recent years, social media have been strategically leveraged by numerous actors for political and commercial gains, from the manipulation of democratic processes in Britain and the U.S. in 2016 to the coordinated spreading of the China bioweapon conspiracy theory about coronavirus in 2020. The problem is of paramount importance, not only because manipulative campaigns are designed to circulate disinformation to shape public opinions, but also for their insidious nature in exploiting the concerns, fears and prejudices of ordinary users and enrolling them to circulate misinformation. 

Recent research proposed novel techniques to detect information campaigns by exploring their propagation patterns built from the network structure, coordinated behaviours, temporal user activities and time series features. However, existing approaches either detect information campaigns at a later stage of its development or rely on historical digital traces to perform postmortem analysis of campaigns after takedowns.

The objective of this research project is to develop computational techniques for early prediction of information campaigns, in the context of which we have limited to no prior knowledge about the information campaign. The outcome of this research will be highly impactful as timely detection of manipulative campaigns minimizes their negative impacts on individuals and society by soliciting early interventions from authorities before they become widespread.