Helping Fact-Checkers Identify Fake News Stories Shared through Images on WhatsApp

WhatsApp has introduced a novel avenue for smartphone users to engage with and disseminate news stories. The convenience of forming interest-based groups and seamlessly sharing content has rendered WhatsApp susceptible to the exploitation of misinformation campaigns. While the process of fact-checking remains a potent tool in identifying fabricated news, its efficacy falters in the face of the unprecedented deluge of information generated on the Internet today. In this work, we explore automatic ranking-based strategies to propose a "fakeness score" model as a means to help fact-checking agencies identify fake news stories shared through images on WhatsApp. Based on the results, we design a tool and integrate it into a real system that has been used extensively for monitoring content during the 2018 Brazilian general election. Our experimental evaluation shows that this tool can reduce by up to 40% the amount of effort required to identify 80% of the fake news in the data when compared to current mechanisms practiced by the fact-checking agencies for the selection of news stories to be checked.Comment: This is a preprint version of an accepted manuscript on the Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web (WebMedia). Please, consider to cite it instead of this on

Synchronizing Web Documents with Style

In this paper we report on our efforts to define a set of document extensions to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that allow for structured timing and synchronization of elements within a Web page. Our work considers the scenario in which the temporal structure can be decoupled from the content of the Web page in a similar way that CSS does with the layout, colors and fonts. Based on the SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) temporal model we propose CSS document extensions and discuss the design and implementation of a proof of concept that realizes our contributions. As HTML5 seems to move away from technologies like Flash and XML (eXtensible Markup Language), we believe our approach provides a flexible declarative solution to specify rich media experiences that is more aligned with current Web practices

Ethics and Design in the Brazilian Context

Often driven by practical and immediate requirements, more and more people are incorporating technology into a variety of aspects of their lives, often without reflecting on the consequences of using them. On the other hand, studies on interactive system development that lead to behavioral change have been gaining ground on the agenda of large HCI conferences. This movement brings to the forefront the fundamental issues of ethics in design and technology use. A designer’s intentions, when directing certain actions or behaviors, are not always explicit or desired by the stakeholders affected by the use of the technology. Systems that induce an undesired purchase, or even those that use conditioning strategies to cause a behavioral change are examples of such intentions. The challenge proposed is therefore about the relationship between design and personal freedom in a way that these technology users do not become victims, either passively or submissively, of the effects of its use. This advance allows for the redefinition of the relationship between man and technology, and the application of new forms of designing and developing interactive systems that take into account the ethical aspects of this relationship

Human computer interaction for international development: past present and future

Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in research into the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of developing regions, particularly into how such ICTs might be appropriately designed to meet the unique user and infrastructural requirements that we encounter in these cross-cultural environments. This emerging field, known to some as HCI4D, is the product of a diverse set of origins. As such, it can often be difficult to navigate prior work, and/or to piece together a broad picture of what the field looks like as a whole. In this paper, we aim to contextualize HCI4D—to give it some historical background, to review its existing literature spanning a number of research traditions, to discuss some of its key issues arising from the work done so far, and to suggest some major research objectives for the future

Integrating memory context into personal information re-finding

Personal information archives are emerging as a new challenge for information retrieval (IR) techniques. The user’s memory plays a greater role in retrieval from person archives than from other more traditional types of information collection (e.g. the Web), due to the large overlap of its content and individual human memory of the captured material. This paper presents a new analysis on IR of personal archives from a cognitive perspective. Some existing work on personal information management (PIM) has begun to employ human memory features into their IR systems. In our work we seek to go further, we assume that for IR in PIM system terms can be weighted not only by traditional IR methods, but also taking the user’s recall reliability into account. We aim to develop algorithms that combine factors from both the system side and the user side to achieve more effective searching. In this paper, we discuss possible applications of human memory theories for this algorithm, and present results from a pilot study and a proposed model of data structure for the HDMs achieves