Newswise — A University of Arkansas at Little Rock information science professor is one of four experts set to participate in a roundtable discussion that will be broadcast as a free webcast on March 9 and explore how trolls, bots, and fake news are shaping conversations and shifting public discourse in an online environment. Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy chair and professor of information science, is a member of the next South Big Data Hub Roundtable Series, “Anti-Social Computing: Bots, Lies, and the New Information Environment.” The panel will be held from noon to 1:15 p.m. EST March 9 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and webcast live. The free webcast can be viewed live online or later on the South Big Data Hub YouTube Channel. The roundtable will explore how fake news can spread and the role of different types of actors in creating, spreading, countering, and monitoring such news. “The panel is extremely propitious, especially now when misinformation is rampant in social media and has the potential to affect what people think and believe,” Agarwal said. “I will speak on the role of blogs in disseminating fake news and propagating misinformation. This is a very recent and a disturbing phenomenon that warrants scientific investigation to help journalism, democracy, and society in general.” The panel will be moderated by Lea Shanley, co-executive director of the South Big Data Hub at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Additional panelists include: · Kathleen Carley, professor of computation, organizations, and society and the center director for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems in the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University· Huan Liu, professor of computer science and engineering at Arizona State University· Rand Waltzman, senior information scientist at RAND Corporation and former acting chief technology officer of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University For more information and to watch the roundtable, visit the South Big Data Hub website at https://southbdhub.wordpress.com/programs/virtual-roundtables.

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