The South Tyrol Free Software Conference, SFSCON, is one of Europe’s most established annual conferences on Free Software. SFSCON promotes the use of Free Software in digital infrastructures as a tool to achieve greater innovation and competitiveness. Here decision-makers and developers meet, learn and get inspired.
OW2 is partner of SFSCon since many years now and organizing a conference track where two NGI Search beneficiaries projects will be presented.
OW2 Conference Track
Date: Friday, November 10th, 2023, starting at 2 pm.
Venue: Seminar Room 2
Talk 1: TETYS project
Schedule: 14:15- 14:30
Title:The CORD-19 Topic Visualizer: Exploring the evolution of research topics during the COVID-19 pandemic
Speaker name : Francesco Invernici, Politecnico di Milano
Abstract : The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped research across various fields, producing an unprecedented flood of articles. In response, several open-access corpora were created; among them, the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) collected over a million articles in 2.5 years.
In this presentation, we introduce the CORD-19 Topic Visualizer (CORToViz), a method and tool for exploring CORD-19's scientific abstracts. It uses a stack of modern open source technologies to cluster articles and mine temporal topics. CORToViz has an interactive dashboard for quick topic visualization, time series tracking, and statistical testing.
We will show the results extracted with CORToViz, which allowed us to visualize and tell in a synthetic way what happened to react against COVID-19, comparing it with the key moments of the pandemic. The high adaptability of our approach suits any textual document corpus, and it lends itself easily to exploring new challenging fields of research, such as climate change.
CORToViz represents the first prototype of a series, which we aim to develop within the NGI Search Program, under the TETYS project (Topics Evolution That You See), aiming to build the next-generation Web topics explorer.
Talk 2: HeReFaNMi project
Schedule: 14:30 - 14:45
Title : Can AI counteract Health-related Fake News? HeReFaNMi: an open-source project to counteract health-related misinformation
Speaker name: Alessandro Bruno, PhD in Computer Science, Faculty of Communication, IULM
Abstract: HeReFaNMi (Health-Related Fake News Mitigation) is an NGI-Search-funded project to give back trustworthiness to the Internet community by tackling fake news spread. Other than the well-known cyber threats, several factors have been undermining the Internet search experience lately. One of the pandemic's lessons learned concerns the health-related fake news spread over websites and social media networks. Some nefarious effects came as a non-negligible hesitancy towards national healthcare systems' guidelines. Since then, several AI-powered solutions have been developed to counteract fake news circulation using supervised and unsupervised learning. The task is challenging due to the need for continuous updating upon introducing new scientific findings. The so-called data drift and catastrophic forgetting also affect the effectiveness of AI-powered classification methods. LLMs (Large Language Models) have recently made their way through the AI landscape by delivering unprecedented performances over text analytics, mining, question and answering systems, and text generation. However, LLMs suffer from Hallucination, meaning they can elaborate contents that are unreliable as a source of truth even when fine-tuned on scientifically sound datasets.
More information about SFScon: https://www.sfscon.it/