Updates from I2SC

  Mitigating m an-made climate change is one of the biggest challenges the global community is currently facing. To limit the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG s ) in general, but of carbon dioxide ( CO2 ) as the main contributor specifically , carbon sequestration has become vital, with reforestation being suggested as one of the core contributors. Consequently , countries have invested in planting many trees and protecting existing forests to mitigate climate change. Similarly, the United Nations has been at the forefront of promoting this idea by introducing the framework REDD+ (Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) to encourage climate change mitigation efforts through halting and reversing forest loss and degradation through the conservation, management and expansion of forests. While reforestation projects have proliferated in the past decade, monitoring efforts have not kept up similarly . Since it takes many years for a t

  After working as an intern in the United Nations Information Integrity Unit (previously called the Addressing Mis/Disinformation Unit) for five months, I (Brahmani) finally had a chance to visit the United Nations headquarters located in New York in April 2024.  As I approached the end of my internship, it was great to meet the team I only interacted with virtually until that point. For someone who comes from a purely technical background, it was a new experience to work in a truly multidisciplinary team.   As part of my internship, I worked on developing network analysis techniques to analyse the behaviour of different actors in the information environment, along with testing LLMs for narrative analysis. I've also contributed to a retrospective report on Mali, which looks at the shift in information space during the 7 months when the mission withdrew from Mali . Apart from this, I've worked on integrating new data streams and developing new training modules for in-mission tr

Societal Computing Group at PAA 2024 Our Postdoc Dr. Till Koebe got the chance to present two of the group's works at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA) that took place between April 17th and 20th, 2024 in Columbus, Ohio, USA. The Annual Meeting of the PAA is one of the leading conferences for population trend research and gathers scientists from the field of demography, economics and other social sciences every year from all over the world. In recent years, data innovation, spatial demography and computational approaches have been becoming increasingly prominent topics on the meeting agenda. Besides meeting project partners from the University of Oxford-led Digital Gender Gaps team, both the work on social connectedness and health behaviour formation as well as the work on the consumption of child pornography has been presented to an audience of demographers, economists and sociologists. It was good to be there and see you again PAA!

Jianlong stands in front of his poster and explains the experimental setup. In April 2024, I (Jianlong) embarked on my first work trip to the Netherlands. I spent two days at the CWI in Amsterdam 1 presenting a poster and attending workshops on AI, media and democracy , and another day in Utrecht for the annual conference of the Digital Society . The CWI workshops attracted participants working in various sectors, from education and startups to city councils and media organizations. Among the many consensus shared by the stakeholders, one that most strongly resonated with me as a researcher is the scope of responsibilities of academics. “Doing science” should no longer be equated to writing papers and presenting papers; it is just as important to interact with 1) regulators and lawmakers to enable them to make informed decisions about AI and 2) the public to educate them about the limitations of AI. There had also been a lot of chatters about how advances in AI (i.e. language and imag

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