The Fake News Spreading Plague: Was it Preventable?

In 2010, a paper entitled "From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-time search" won the Best Paper Prize of the Web Science 2010 Conference. Among its findings were the discovery and documentation of what was termed a "Twitter-bomb", an organized effort to spread misinformation about the democratic candidate Martha Coakley through anonymous Twitter accounts. In this paper, after summarizing the details of that event, we outline the recipe of how social networks are used to spread misinformation. One of the most important steps in such a recipe is the "infiltration" of a community of users who are already engaged in conversations about a topic, to use them as organic spreaders of misinformation in their extended subnetworks. Then, we take this misinformation spreading recipe and indicate how it was successfully used to spread fake news during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The main differences between the scenarios are the use of Facebook instead of Twitter, and the respective motivations (in 2010: political influence; in 2016: financial benefit through online advertising). After situating these events in the broader context of exploiting the Web, we seize this opportunity to address limitations of the reach of research findings and to start a conversation about how communities of researchers can increase their impact on real-world societal issues

Renal oncocytoma mimicking renal carcinoma

Renal Oncocytomas are rare benign renal masses. They can be easily mistaken for Renal Cell Cancers and patients usually undergo a radical nephrectomy. We present a case of a female patient who was admitted with a large mass originating from the right kidney. The results from the CT (stellate scar) and the angiography (spoke-wheel pattern) were consistent with Renal Oncocytoma, but still a radical nephrectomy was performed. This decision was made due to the inability of the current diagnostic procedures to safely differentiate Renal Oncocytomas from Renal Cell Cancer

Parallel Algorithms For Graph Problems

In this thesis we examine three problems in graph theory and propose efficient parallel algorithms for solving them. We also introduce a number of parallel algorithmic techniques

Investigating Rumor Propagation with TwitterTrails

Social media have become part of modern news reporting, used by journalists to spread information and find sources, or as a news source by individuals. The quest for prominence and recognition on social media sites like Twitter can sometimes eclipse accuracy and lead to the spread of false information. As a way to study and react to this trend, we introduce {\sc TwitterTrails}, an interactive, web-based tool ({\tt twittertrails.com}) that allows users to investigate the origin and propagation characteristics of a rumor and its refutation, if any, on Twitter. Visualizations of burst activity, propagation timeline, retweet and co-retweeted networks help its users trace the spread of a story. Within minutes {\sc TwitterTrails} will collect relevant tweets and automatically answer several important questions regarding a rumor: its originator, burst characteristics, propagators and main actors according to the audience. In addition, it will compute and report the rumor's level of visibility and, as an example of the power of crowdsourcing, the audience's skepticism towards it which correlates with the rumor's credibility. We envision {\sc TwitterTrails} as valuable tool for individual use, but we especially for amateur and professional journalists investigating recent and breaking stories. Further, its expanding collection of investigated rumors can be used to answer questions regarding the amount and success of misinformation on Twitter.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, under revie

System and Method for Parallel Error Diffusion Dithering

A system is disclosed for error diffusion dithering. The system includes an input for receiving an input matrix representative of image data, and a plurality of processors. The plurality of processors processes the input matrix and provides output data. Each of the processors is in communication with at least a portion of the input matrix. At least one processor processes a portion of the input matrix defined at least in part by a substantially diagonal edge within the image matrix

Connected Components in O(lg3/2|V|) Parallel Time for the CREW PRAM

Computing the connected components of an undirected graph G = (V,E) on |V| = n vertices and |E| = m edges is a fundamental computational problem. The best known parallel algorithm for the CREW PRAM model runs on O(lg2n) time using n2/lg2n processors [CLC82,HCS79]. For the CRCW PRAM model in which concurrent writing is permitted, the best known algorithm runs in O(lg n) time using almost (n+m)/lg n processors [SV82,CV86,AS87]. Unfortunately, simulating this algorithm on the weaker CREW model increases its running time to O(lg2n) [CDR86, KR90,Vis83]. We present here an efficient and simple algorithm that runs in O(lg 3/2n) time using n+m CREW processors

Optimal Parallel and Sequential Algorithms for the Vertex Updating Problem of a Minimum Spanning Tree

We present a set of rules that can be used to give optimal solutions to the vertex updating problem for a minimum spanning tree: Update a given MST when a new vertex z is introducted, along with weighted edges that connect z with the vertices of the graph. These rules lead to simple parallel algorithms that run in O(lg n) parallel time using n/lg n EREW PRAMs. They can also be used to derive simple linear-time sequential algorithms for the same problem. Furthermore, we show how our solution can be used to solve the multiple vertex updating problem