Published September 27, 2021
A multidisciplinary research team led by the University at Buffalo has been awarded $750,000 to develop digital literacy tools to curb the deleterious effects of online disinformation, reported the Niagara Gazette.
The grant is from the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator, a program launched in 2019 that builds upon basic research and discovery to accelerate solutions toward societal impact.
“Just as a vaccine inoculates individuals from a virus, we want to inoculate media consumers from disinformation. Inoculated users form the first line of defense against the spread of corrupted and misleading information,” says the grant’s principal investigator, Siwei Lyu, Empire Innovation Professor of computer science and engineering at UB.