The AILab participated at the event “Disinformation Battles: The tools to fight it in the Digital Era” which was held on July 18th at Limassol.

The event’s theme targeted fake news, propaganda spreading and hate speech, which are prominent online, however journalists, policy makers and educators do not currently have the tools to  tackle these issues.

The event was open to the general public and the audience featured journalists, policy makers, educators, computer scientists, psychologists and sociologists. The event was sponsored by the British Council and the US Embassy through the TechCamp funding scheme.

Dr. Demetris Trihinas gave a workshop entitled “Telling a Story – or Even Propaganda – Through Data Visualization”.

The talk’s abstract is the following:

A Chinese proverb states that “a picture is worth 1000 words”… it may even be worth more. Expanding on this point, this talk goes beyond aesthetics by introducing data visualization as a powerful tool for data exploration and knowledge communication. However, although data visualizations can be used to make story narratives more apprehendable and statistics easier to digest, they can also be used for deceit, misinformation and even propaganda. The negative impact of storytelling through data will be a prominent part of this talk where we will cover how misinformation can prevail unintentionally by misinterpreting the knowledge extracted from data, and intentionally by “fitting” the visualization to the message that must be conveyed.

You can find the slides of the presentation on SlideShare by clicking here.