News Story

KMi Doctoral Students present their research in Austin, Texas

Jane Whild, Tuesday 9 May 2023

Congratulations to three KMi’s Doctoral Students who presented their research to the international community in Austin Texas last week.

Ángel Pavón Pérez and Joseph Kwarteng presented papers at the 15th ACM Web Science Conference 2023 (WebSci 2023) in Austin Texas on 1st May. Each student were lead authors representing their co-author teams.

Ángel took part in Paper Session 4: Fairness and Bias which was chaired by KMi’s Director, Harith Alani. Tracking Machine Learning Bias Creep in Traditional and Online Learning Systems with Covariance Analysis. His paper summarised his doctoral research into algorithms used in online banking services, which can sometimes in unfair decisions toward certain groups.

Joseph participated in Paper Session 5: Harmful and Problematic Behaviour which was chaired by Giuseppe Russo. His paper, Understanding Misogynoir: A Study of Annotators’ Perspectives, demonstrated the challenge of using online methods to detect misogynoir due to the subjectivity and intersectional nature of people’s opinions and interpretations of hate speech.

Doctoral Student, Em Dean, presented their paper to the PhD Symposium at The Web Conference 2023 which was co-located with WebSci’23. Em’s paper entitled A Bridge over the Troll: Non-Complementary Activism Online looks at attempts by marginalised communities to use online media to generate organic engagement in activism.

Also attending the events in Texas was John Domingue who, with Aisling Third, had co-organised the Trusting Decentralised Knowledge Graphs and Web Data Workshop (TrusDeKW). This was the second of three distinct workshops being convened in 2023 for the Web Community to explore decentralised approaches for web data and Knowledge Graphs.

Harith Alani said: “I was very proud to see such an active representation of KMi at this world-leading event. It was a valuable opportunity to show the community our latest research, and for our researchers to connect and collaborate with peers from around the world.”

A highlight of the trip was when the team attended this year’s Turing Lecture delivered by Bob Metcalfe, Emeritus UT Austin Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Professor Metcalfe is the co-inventor of Ethernet, co-founded 3Com, and formulated Metcalfe’s law, which describes the effect of a telecommunications network.

WebSci’2023 was co-located with the prestigious The Web Conference 2023 (TheWebConf 2023) which was formerly known as International World Wide Web Conference, abbreviated as WWW. TheWebConf is a yearly international academic conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web. For over three decades this conference has been the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of the topics related to the Web. Since 2022, the event has been integrated with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Hypertext and the Web (SIGWEB) and is managed by a new steering committee within ACM. WebSci’24 will be held in Stuttgart, Germany. ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges.

Read the papers here: