This is coming from a group of scholars and developers interested in the phenomenon of fake news and of misinformation in general. I am sure several people on this list will be interested in this!

Cheers

G

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jennifer 8. Lee jenny8lee@gmail.com Date: Mon, May 1, 2017 at 4:18 PM Subject: [fakenewssci] Credibility Schema working group To: fakenewssci@googlegroups.com

A project some folks in this group should find interesting.

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Hacks/Hackers, Meedan and others are working together on a new initiative to create a schema around news credibility. We’re gathering folks in San Francisco and NYC over the next six weeks.

• May 11 in San Francisco (downtown location TBD) • June 7 in New York (at Columbia Universty's Brown Institute of Media Innovation).

Both of these events will be a one-day workshop to develop training data for content online, and we'd have an agenda for 15-20 people in each location.

Here's the lowdown on the working group:

PROJECT SUMMARY The credibility schema working group is an initiative to convene a critical mass of researchers, data scientists, journalists, librarians and others to address the challenge of developing training data for better machine learning algorithms and services that address misinformation ecosystems. We aim to build off the great work done by the Trust Project. and First Draft, and combine both a journalistic and machine learning approach to this project.

As concerns grow about the importance of establishing credible content, two challenges emerge: (1) how to communicate this credibility as content travels around the web, often separated from its original source, and (2) how to handle massive amounts of content at scale. Addressing both of these challenges requires new approaches and techniques: for the former, a new set of interoperable data schema, and for the latter, training data based on those schema that can be applied to machine learning algorithms.

The need for technical schema emerged out of an impromptu working group at MisinfoCon, a conference on misinformation and journalism at MIT Media Lab hosted by Hacks/Hackers, First Draft News and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, after it was clear that many groups were working to make this happen. We will be having two gatherings — one in San Francisco and one in New York — to engage a core working group who have expressed an interest in this topic.

You can read more about that workshop here: https://misinfocon.com/building-technical-standards-for-credibility-59ef9ee4...

INTERESTED? WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU: If you are interested in attending, please email me at jenny@hackshackers.com and An Xiao Mina at an@meedan.com and let us know which event you/your team can attend.

Assuming capacity is okay, we’ll make sure to put you on the list of attendees. If you have questions, we're happy to discuss via phone or Hangout in the coming days. And, if you know of other folks we should invite, please let us know