HT’23 is hosting three great Keynotes from Hartih Alani, Jill Walker Rettberg and Aldo Gangemi respectively on the 6th, 7th and 8th of September at 9:30.
Fact-Checks vs Misinformation:
The Ongoing Battle
Wednesday 6th of September 2023 at 9:30 CET
You’re probably getting a bit worn out from all these talks about misinformation and Twitter-based experiments. The fact that Twitter is now called Platform X is probably not enough of a change to keep you awake during my talk! But I think, or hope, to bring up a few things in this talk that you might not have come across or thought about much before. I believe that having fact-checks that call out false or misleading claims is very important in our fight against misinformation. But we’re still not quite sure if and how they impact the spread of wrong information and how they could help set things right online. So, in this talk, I’ll dive into how we’re all prone to falling for misinformation and make a case for needing data and tools to help us see how both ourselves and others engage with false or unreliable information over long periods of time. I’ll also share what we’ve learnt from our research about how these fact-checks affect how wrong info spreads, and I’ll give you the scoop on what happened when we tried using automatic replies to correct misinforming posts on Twitter, oops, I mean platform X.
If all of this feels like old news to you, well, there’s always that email inbox to keep you awake during my keynote.

Harith Alani is the Director of the Knowledge Media institute and Professor of Web Science at The Open University in the UK. His interdisciplinary Social Data Science research group focuses on applying data science and computational social science methods to model, understand and track various social phenomena on the web, and in particular on social media. In recent years, his work concentrated on studying online misinformation, supported by several international projects, including HERoS; to study the dynamics of COVID19 related misinformation and fact-checks, Co-Inform; to analyse individuals’ interaction with misinformation on social media, and CIMPLE; to investigate knowledge-based explanations of misinformation detection techniques. Harith has over 180 publications and his work on misinformation was featured by various media outlets and contributed to two UK parliamentary policy reports.
Perspectival modelling of human-centred knowledge
Friday 8th of September 2023 at 9:30 CET
A perspective is an entity appearing when some facts are described in alternative ways, either informally or in structured data. Perspectives emerge in all domains, and especially in the humanities.The ways they impact our thinking are not fully understood in general, let alone when we study them in computer science or when we want to shape data and knowledge according to perspectives. In the lecture I will provide examples of multimodal perspectives, perspectival modelling and integration, and of ways to empirically investigate perspectivisation in an extended reality.

Aldo Gangemi is Full Professor at University of Bologna, where he coordinates the HumanisticAI branch of AlmaAI (Alma Mater Institute for Human-centred Artificial Intelligence). Since 2019, he is Director of the Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of Italian National Research Council, Rome, where he co-founded the Semantic Technology Lab in 2008. He sits as member of the Board of Directors at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca.
His research focuses on Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence as an integration of methods from Knowledge Engineering, the Semantic Web, Cognitive Science, and Natural Language Processing Processing.
His theoretical interests concentrate upon the representation and discovery of knowledge patterns across data, ontologies, natural language, and cognition, using hybrid symbolic/sub-symbolic methods. Applications domains include Cultural Heritage, Industry, Medicine, Law, eGovernment, Agriculture and Fishery, and Public Administration.
He has published more than 250 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, conferences and books (Scholar H-index=62), and sits as Editor or EB member of international journals (Semantic Web, Web Semantics, Applied Ontology), conference chair (LREC2006, EKAW2008, WWW2015, ESWC2018), has coordinated research teams in 8 EU projects and is the scientific coordinator of the H2020 SPICE project.
He is one of the designers of the DOLCE foundational ontology, the Framester factual-linguistic linked data cloud, the ArCo cultural heritage ontologies for the Italian Ministry, the OntoPiA ontologies for Italian Public Administration, and the FRED, Sentilo, and Aemoo software projects (cf. http://stlab.istc.cnr.it/stlab-tools). He is one of the initiators of the Ontology Design Patterns movement