{"id":69297,"date":"2018-04-09T11:15:58","date_gmt":"2018-04-09T15:15:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/?p=69297"},"modified":"2024-03-07T11:37:14","modified_gmt":"2024-03-07T16:37:14","slug":"institute-incubated-research-leveraged-for-major-google-research-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/2018\/04\/09\/institute-incubated-research-leveraged-for-major-google-research-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Institute-incubated Research Leveraged for Major Google Research Award"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following article was published on the Hariri Institute’s website on Friday, March 16th, 2018.<\/a><\/p>\n

To see the complete list of 2017 award recipien<\/span><\/i>ts<\/em>, please visit\u00a0<\/span><\/i>Research at Google.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

What began as a small, Hariri Institute seed-funded research project to explore new methods for analyzing social media data has grown into a Google-sponsored, award-winning research endeavor.<\/p>\n

Lei Guo<\/a>, Hariri Junior Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Studies, received a Hariri Research Incubation award in June of 2016 to pursue her proposal,\u00a0Statistically Principled and Scalable Computational Tools for Transforming Communication Research<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/em>Working with co-PIs\u00a0<\/span>Prakash Ishwar<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>(Professor, ECE, SE) and\u00a0<\/span>Margrit Betke<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>(former Institute Steering Committee member & Professor, CS) and collaborators\u00a0<\/span>Jacob Groshek\u00a0(Junior Faculty Fellow & Assistant Professor, Emerging Media Studies) and\u00a0<\/span>Dino Christenson\u00a0<\/span>(Faculty Fellow & Associate Professor, Political Science), the initial project aimed to explore reliable methods of analyzing big data in social contexts in communication research, analyzing ways to detect topics on Twitter and other social platforms.\u00a0Hailing from four very different departments, the team of researchers found support for their cross-disciplinary research at the Hariri Institute for Computing. Betke and Guo connected at\u00a0Guo\u2019s \u201cMeet Our Fellows\u201d presentation that she gave after being appointed a\u00a0Junior Faculty Fellow at the Institute.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fast forward two years, and the team is now leveraging their initial work to solicit support for follow-on research. Led by PI Margrit Betke \u2014\u00a0working\u00a0with co-PIs Guo and Ishwar \u2014 the goal of the Google-sponsored project is to develop machine learning and human computing\u00a0methods for news aggregators to ensure that they present balanced real-time content representing diverse political perspectives to their users. The research aims to\u00a0not just identify and analyze left- and\/or right-leaning content, but content that samples the full political landscape in the US. The proposal is a\u00a0winner of the\u00a02017 Google Research Award\u00a0<\/em>in the \u201cInformation Retrieval and Real Time Content\u201d category.<\/span><\/p>\n

The\u00a0<\/span>Hariri Institute for Computing\u00a0selectively seed funds\u00a0new collaborations that cross typical disciplinary boundaries as well as support ambitious research and forward-looking education initiatives.\u00a0Current and previously funded projects represent a broad array of the exciting new computing-related and data-driven research happening across the BU community.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following article was published on the Hariri Institute’s website on Friday, March 16th, 2018. To see the complete list of 2017 award recipients, please visit\u00a0Research at Google. What began as a small, Hariri Institute seed-funded research project to explore new methods for analyzing social media data has grown into a Google-sponsored, award-winning research endeavor. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[236,287,240,907,1147,239,910],"tags":[368,273,258,262,369,370,371,372,374,375,376,377],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69297"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69297"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":147595,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69297\/revisions\/147595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}