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，尤其是在信息的快速和广泛传播方面。然而，不良行为者利用了社交媒体，例如通过信息操纵。虽然已经为解决这一问题作出了努力，但在实践中研究和打击信息操纵存在着各种挑战。该项目旨在通过将一套算法、软件框架和系统设计从研究实验室转移到积极的实践者手中来应对这些挑战，以帮助识别和减少信息操纵(错误信息和错误信息)。该项目的创新之处在于设计和开发了可用于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。根据该项目创建的生产就绪软件还可以帮助未来的从业者了解系统、机器学习和数据科学领域的基本软件开发技能。在此提案中，项目团队的目标是将使尖端研究得以实现的工具转化为实践。该项目团队将开发一个功能齐全的爬虫构建工具包，该工具包是根据在各种大型社交媒体数据收集系统上的工作经验构建的。接下来，项目团队将开发一个数据表征和增强工具包，集成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，从业者可以围绕其构建新技术。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.