Dietrich Faculty Among Six Grants Awarded by Google

Six Carnegie Mellon University faculty members, including one affiliated with the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, received grants through Google's inaugural Research Scholar Program. The program provides up to $60,000 to support the research efforts of early career professors.

Sivaraman Balakrishnan, an assistant professor of statistics in the Dietrich College and an affiliated faculty member in the Machine Learning Department, received a grant jointly with Aravindan Vijayaraghavan, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Northwestern University.

Learn more about CMU faculty involved in the Google Research Scholar Program.

Knight Foundation Investment Creates Center To Fight Online Disinformation.

Bots, trolls, state-run propaganda, information warfare and hate speech are some of the most pervasive ways that societal discourse is being warped in the modern era. In 2019, CMU launched the Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity (IDeaS) to explore how disinformation is spread through online channels and address how to counter its effects to preserve and build an informed citizenry. The Knight Foundation provided a $5 million, six-year investment for Knight Fellows, as well as an annual conference of scientists, practitioners, journalists and policymakers to discuss research and public policy around technology’s impact on democracy. The center aims to develop effective solutions with teams of experts in network analysis, machine learning and natural language processing, as well as ethics, sociology and political science. The School of Computer Science’s Kathleen Carley directs IDeaS. Dietrich College’s David Danks and the College of Engineering’s Douglas Sicker serve as co-directors.