Reducing Information Ecosystem Threats (RIET) Lab

The Reducing Information Ecosystem Threats (RIET) Lab researches some of the most vexing threats to democratic nations, including disinformation, weaponized controversy, trust erosion on- and offline, and botnets, from a computational perspective. We use state-of-the-art technologies and collect petabyte-scale datasets from social networks.

Our research focuses on threats to the information ecosystem online and to healthy public discourse from an information retrieval lens, informed by insights from the social sciences. Upcoming projects address the connections between m/disinformation and weaponized controversy, online and in social networks; and utilizing cybersecurity and graph theoretic approaches to detect malicious actors. Additionally, our research addresses fairness and bias in medicine. The RIET lab tackles these research questions from an AI ethics, fairness & safety perspective.