Collaborative Research: SaTC: TTP: Medium: iDRAMA.cloud: A Platform for Measuring and Understanding Information Manipulation

社交媒体对我们的社会至关重要，特别是在快速和广泛的信息传播方面。然而，不良行为者利用社交媒体，例如通过操纵信息。虽然已经做出了努力来解决这个问题，但存在各种挑战，使得在实践中难以研究和打击信息操纵。该项目旨在通过将一组算法，软件框架和系统设计从研究实验室转移到活跃的从业者手中来解决这些挑战，以帮助识别和减轻信息操纵（错误信息和虚假信息）。该项目的新颖之处在于设计和开发了能够生产的开源软件套件，以实现对社交媒体数据的快速收集、管理和分析。该项目更广泛的意义和重要性主要与确保信息生态系统的稳定有关。 在该项目下创建的生产就绪软件还可以帮助教育未来的从业者在系统，机器学习和数据科学领域的基本软件开发技能。在该提案中，项目团队旨在将使尖端研究成为现实的工具过渡。该项目团队将开发一个功能齐全的爬虫构建工具包，该工具包是根据各种大型社交媒体数据收集系统的工作经验构建的。接下来，项目团队将开发一个数据表征和增强工具包，整合来自信息处理研究的最先进技术。最后，项目团队将开发一套数据访问和共享API，包括一个联邦子系统，从业者可以围绕它构建新技术。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Social media has become crucial to our society, especially when it comes to the rapid and broad dissemination of information. However, bad actors have exploited social media, for example via information manipulation. While there have been efforts made to address the problem, there are a variety of challenges that make it difficult to study and combat information manipulation in practice. This project aims to address these challenges by transitioning a set of algorithms, software frameworks, and system designs out of the research lab into the hands of active practitioners to help identify and mitigate information manipulation (misinformation and dis-information). This project’s novelties are the design and development of production capable, open-source software suite to enable the rapid collection, management, and analysis of social media data. The project’s broader significance and importance is primarily related to ensuring the stability of the information ecosystem. The production ready software created under the project can also help educate future practitioners about fundamental software development skills in the areas of systems, machine learning, and data science.In this proposal, the project team aims to transition the tooling that has enabled cutting edge research into practice. The project team will develop a full featured crawler construction toolkit built from experiences working on a variety of large-scale social media data collection systems. Next, the project team will develop a data characterization and augmentation toolkit, integrating state-of-the-art techniques from information manipulation research. Finally, the project team will develop a set of data access and sharing APIs, including a federation subsystem, that practitioners can build new technologies around.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.