ADM+S PhD Student wins third place at ACM ICMI’24 for paper developed during research visit
Author Natalie Campbell
Date 11 December 2024
ADM+S PhD Student Sachin Pathiyan Cherumanal from RMIT University has returned from the 2024 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), winning third place for a paper developed during a 2023 research visit.
In March 2023, A. Prof Ujwal Gadiraju, Director of the Delft AI Design at Scale Lab, visited the ADM+ Centre and presented his work on ‘The How, What, and Why of Effecting Human-AI Decision-Making’.
It was during this visit that ADM+S PhD Student Sachin Pathiyan Cherumanal identified synergies between Ujwal’s research, and his own PhD topic: Fairness-Aware Question Answering for Intelligent Assistants.
“Our mutual interest in interactive information access, misinformation management, cognitive bias and the ADM+S project ‘Quantifying and Measuring Bias and Engagement’, sparked discussions that later led to us collaborating on this project,” explained Sachin.
This connection inspired a three-month research visit to TU Delft (funded by Dr Spina’s ARC DECRA Fellowship) September-December 2023, working with Ujwal and colleagues from the Web Information Systems group of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science.
During this visit, Sachin, Ujwal, and Damiano Spina (RMIT) developed the paper, ‘Everything We Hear: Towards Tackling Misinformation in Podcasts’, which was published and presented at the recent ACM ICMI’24 in San Jose, Costa Rica.
In the paper, authors argues that the rise of podcasts as a popular medium for disseminating information necessitates a proactive strategy to combat the spread of misinformation in this format.
The work envisions the application of auditory alerts as an effective tool to tackle misinformation in podcasts and proposes the integration of alerts to notify listeners of potential misinformation within the podcasts they are listening to.
The authors identify several opportunities and challenges in this path and aim to provoke novel conversations around instruments, methods, and measures to tackle misinformation in podcasts.
The paper was presented in the Blue Sky track, which calls for open-ended, possibly “outrageous” or “wacky” ideas that present new problems, new application domains, or new methodologies that are likely to stimulate significant new research, and was awarded third prize.
“The presentation sparked insightful and diverse perspectives from the audience,” he said.
“The discussions following the presentation involving experts from diverse research areas also inspired us to think of possibilities of multimodal approaches to address misinformation in podcasts.”
While at the conference, Sachin also presented Towards Investigating Biases in Spoken Conversational Search on behalf of ADM+S co-authors Prof Falk Scholer, Dr Damiano Spina, and Dr Johanne Trippas.
Towards Investigating Biases in Spoken Conversational Search addresses the challenging linear-nature of voice-based systems and proposes four means of further examination into designing fair and effective voice-based systems.
This research visit was supported by ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society and the DECRA awarded to Dr Spina, DE200100064.
