Harith Alani's profile document
Description for Harith Alani
Harith Alani
Harith Alani
Harith
Alani
KMi Director
halani
Professor of Web Science at the Knowledge Media institute, The Open University, and leader of the Social Data Science group. Previously to joining KMi, I was a senior research fellow at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton. Published more than 150 scientific papers, and Co-ordinated several international projects. Check my homepage for further detail (http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/harith/)
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The Open University account for Harith Alani
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Harith Alani's membership at KMi
Harith Alani on LinkedIn
Harith Alani on SlideShare
Harith Alani's participation in Sense4Us
Sense4Us
Sense4Us
2013-10-01
2016-10-01
tools and techniques to enable policy makers to gather, integrate, and analyse policy-related discussions
The objective of the EU FP7 Sense4us project is to advance policy modelling and simulation, data analytics and social network discussion dynamics, providing economic and social benefits at all governmental levels across Europe. The project will provide tools enabling policy makers to find and select relevant information; link and homogenise the data; model policy in terms of constraints and intent; validate the policy; discover and incorporate views from NGOs and public; predict social impact of policy; provide decision support; and provide understandable visualisation.
Harith Alani's participation in WeGov
WeGov
WeGov
2010-01-01
2012-09-30
Where eGovernment meets the eSociety
Social networking technology provides major new opportunities for policy makers (eGovernment) to engage with the community (eSociety). WeGov will develop a toolset that allows full advantage to be taken of a wide range of existing and well established social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) to engage citizens in two-way dialogs as part of governance and policymaking processes. The tools will make it possible to detect, track and mine opinions, behaviour, and discussions on policy oriented topics.
The tools will allow discussions to be seeded and stimulated through injection of policy discussion points into relevant communities in a secure and managed way.
A key feature of our approach is to allow policy makers to move away from the limitations inherent in the current practice of using bespoke and dedicated platforms (e.g. specific opinion soliciting websites hosted by government) and instead make full use of the high levels of participation and rich discussions that already take place in existing social networking communities. In this way, WeGov will develop the tools and techniques for closing the loop between policy makers and the citizens.
WeGov is funded under the EU 7th Framework Programme, and involves University of Southampton (IT Innovation and ILAWS), KMi, GFI, Gov2U, GESIS, University of Koblenz, and the Hansard Society.
Harith Alani's participation in ROBUST
ROBUST
ROBUST
2010-11-01
2013-10-31
ROBUST aims to analyze, manage and care for online communities to support their well being & to measure their created value.
Online communities have emerged in all areas of society, and their use is now widespread in social, business, scientific and public service domains. They enable the community members to collaborate through shared ideas, knowledge and opinion. Thus, online communities generate major economic value to business and can form pivotal parts of corporate expertise management, corporate marketing, product support, customer relationship management, product innovation and targeted advertising.
The objective of ROBUST is to analyze, manage and care for online communities, in order support their well being, to provide access to the created values and to exploit the knowledge and information contained within. This requires the development of metrics, models and algorithms in several fields.
ROBUST is a 3 year, �6.8M EU project with a consortium of 10 partners from 6 countries. ROBUST is led by the University of Koblenz-Landau, and involves the companies of IBM, SAP, Polecat, Temis, and SoftwareMind, as well as the academic institutions of OU KMi, University of Southampton, National University of Ireland, and the Technical University of Berlin.
Harith Alani's participation in DecarboNet
DecarboNet
DecarboNet
2013-10-01
2016-09-30
A Decarbonisation Platform for Citizen Empowerment and Translating Collective Awareness into Behavioural Change
The lack of collective awareness negatively impacts perceived personal efficacy, which hampers efforts to address societal problems. DecarboNet is a multidisciplinary effort to tackle this problem by identifying determinants of collective awareness, translating awareness into behavioural change, and providing novel methods to analyse and visualise the underlying processes.
DecarboNet will research and develop (i) generic tools to co-create knowledge with on-the-fly recommendations of related content from multiple sources; (ii) a cross-platform social media application to provide eco-feedback and engage citizens in games with a purpose; and (iii) methods to measure and predict behavioural change, and to capture collective awareness in a quantitative framework based on diffusion models and resonance patterns in public discourse.
DecarboNet is funded under the FP7 ICT call for Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation - CAPS. CAPS are ICT systems to leverage the crowds and the emerging "network effect" by combining distributed knowledge creation, with data from online social media and from real environments ("Internet of Things") in order to increase engagement and awareness of problems and possible solutions that require collective efforts and novel forms of social innovation.
Harith Alani's participation in ReelLives
ReelLives
ReelLives
2013-10-01
2016-10-01
Development of filmic representations of social media content for individuals and groups using a mixture of semantic, content, and network analysis
ReelLives is a interdisciplinary project funded by EPSRC. ReelLives aims to combine our expertise and technologies in social media data processing and semantic extraction, with social science expertise in citizen identity, trust, and culture, to build tools for automatic generation of filmic, narrative structures from social media, that are easy to comprehend and edit and that allow for a simple comparison of one digital life with another
Harith Alani's participation in COMRADES
COMRADES
COMRADES
2016-01-01
2018-12-31
Collective Platform for Community Resilience & Social Innovation During Crises
Harith Alani's participation in TRIVALENT
TRIVALENT
TRIVALENT
2017-05-01
2020-04-30
EU H2020 project to develop advanced method for detecting and measuring violent radicalisation behaviour on social media.
TRIVALENT is a H2020 funded project which aims to a better understanding of root causes of the phenomenon of violent radicalisation in Europe in order to develop appropriate countermeasures, ranging from early detection methodologies to techniques of counter-narrative.
Harith Alani's participation in Co-Inform
Co-Inform
Co-Inform
2018-04-01
2021-03-31
Co-Creating Misinformation-Resilient Societies
Misinformation generates misperceptions, which have affected policies in many domains, including economy, health, environment, and foreign policy. Co-Inform is about empowering citizens, journalists, and policymakers with co-created socio-technical solutions, to increase resilience to misinformation, and to generate more informed behaviours and policies. The aim of Co-Inform is to co-create these solutions, with citizens, journalists, and policymakers, for (a) detecting and combating a variety of misinforming posts and articles on social media, (b) supporting, persuading, and nourishing misinformation-resilient behaviour, (c) bridging between the public on social media, external fact checking journalists, and policymakers, (d) understanding and predicting which misinforming news and content are likely to spread across which parts of the network and demographic sectors, (e) infiltrating echo-chambers on social media, to expose confirmation-biased networks to different perceptions and corrective information, and (f) providing policymakers with advanced misinformation analysis to support their policy making process and validation. To achieve these goals, Co-Inform will bring together a multidisciplinary team of scientists and practitioners, to foster co-creational methodologies and practices for engaging stakeholders in combating misinformation posts and news articles, combined with advanced intelligent methods for misinformation detection, misinformation flow prediction, and real-time processing and measurement of crowds' acceptance or refusal of misinformation. Co-Inform tools and platform will be made freely available and open sourced to maximise benefit and reuse. Three main stakeholder groups will be directly engaged throughout this process; citizens, journalists, and policymakers.
Harith Alani's participation in AI4EDI
AI4EDI
AI4EDI
AI technologies to tackle EDI related issues
AI is here. We interact with AI technology every time we search online, interact on a social media platform or use a credit card. We know that AI can be a force for good, for example, OU Analyse uses machine learning to help identify students at risk of failing. Given the ubiquity of this technology, it is important though that we understand its potential impact, good and bad, for all users. Within AI4EDI we will highlight EDI issues related to AI research and innovation. In particular, how AI can help address EDI issues, such as the awarding gap for black students, and EDI challenges that can be present in AI systems, such as data and decision-making bias.
Harith Alani's participation in HERoS
HERoS
HERoS
Health Emergency Response in Interconnected Systems
HERoS aims to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the response to the Covid-19 outbreak. HERoS creates and provides policies and guidelines for improved crisis governance, focusing on responders to public health emergencies, and their needs to make informed decisions. HERoS further improves the predictions of the spread by understanding and modelling the impact of local behaviour on the spread of the disease. The OU's role in HERoS is to study the spread of misinformation and corresponding fact-checks related to COVID-19 on social media.
Harith Alani's participation in NoBias
NoBias
NoBias
Artificial Intelligence without Bias
NoBIAS aims to develop novel methods for AI-based decision making without bias by taking into account ethical and legal considerations in the design of technical solutions. The core objectives of NoBIAS are to understand legal, social and technical challenges of bias in AI-decision making, to counter them by developing fairness-aware algorithms, to automatically explain AI results, and to document the overall process for data provenance and transparency.
Harith Alani's participation in CIMPLE
CIMPLE
CIMPLE
Countering Creative Information Manipulation with Explainable AI
CIMPLE aims to experiment with innovative social and knowledge-driven AI explanations, and to use computational creativity techniques to generate powerful, engaging, and easily and quicky understandable explanations of rather complex AI decisions and behaviour. These explanations will be tested in the domain of detection and tracking of manipulated information, taking into account social, psychological and technical explainability needs and requirements. Covid-19, and climate change, are the main two use cases to be investigated.