Handeling Media Overload

BU CHASSProject Leads: Lei Guo, Prakash Ishwar, Derry Wijaya, and Margrit Betke

Between news articles, tweets, Facebook memes, online videos, Reddit threads, and all the other media sources that we routinely tap into, it seems impossible these days to be informed without being overloaded, or to stay connected without getting hopelessly tangled up.

But what if there were a machine or mechanism that could take in all that information—words, pictures, posts, and videos, even in dozens of different languages—and somehow make sense of it all? Better yet, what if that machine could measure public sentiment about any given event, figure out how different media outlets are covering it, and unscramble the relationship between the two?

That’s the goal of a boundary-breaking collaboration between Boston University researchers Margrit Betke, College of Arts & Sciences professor of computer science, Prakash Ishwar, College of Engineering professor of electrical and computer engineering and systems engineering, Lei Guo, College of Communication assistant professor of emerging media studies, and Derry Wijaya, College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of computer science. In September 2018, the BU team received a $1 million, four-year research grant from the National Science Foundation to advance their work.

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