Wednesday, December 9, 20207:30 am - 8:30 am
Data for Good seminars address societal challenges and bring humanistic perspectives to science and technology.
Cong Yu, Manager, Senior Staff Research Scientist, Structured Data Group, Google Research; and Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Courant Institute, New York University
December 9, 2020 (12:30 PM – 1:30 PM ET) – Online Event REGISTER HERE
DSI Data, Media and Society Center
Better News Understanding via Language Learning Abstract: The news ecosystem is going through unprecedented changes and has never been more important in shaping our societies and supporting freedom and democracy. In this talk, I will briefly describe how our research group is working towards better technologies for understanding news and mitigating misinformation to help address some of those challenges.
Bio: Cong Yu is a research scientist and manager at Google Research in New York. He leads the research group on news and misinformation understanding. The group’s mission is to apply state-of-the-art NLP/ML and structured data technologies to understand newsy and fresh multi-modal information and to mitigate the spread of misinformation. Partnering with journalists and policy advisors, the group is responsible for products such as WebTables, Structured Snippets, Fact Checking at Google, and contributes to a variety of consumer-facing Google products such as GNews and Top Stories in Search.
His personal research interests are structured data exploration and mining, computational journalism, social content analysis and recommendation, human-scalable information management, and applied ML and NLP. He was a conference keynote speaker for VLDB 2019 and twice served as an industrial program co-chair for VLDB (2013 and 2018). Before Google, Cong was a Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, also in New York. He has a PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, advised by Prof. H.V. Jagadish.