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Chirag Shah is an Associate Professor in the Information School (iSchool). He is the Founding Director of InfoSeeking Lab, which focuses on issues related to information seeking, human-computer interaction (HCI), and social media, supported by grants from National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of Health (NIH), Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Amazon, Google, and Yahoo. Shah’s research involves studies of interactive information retrieval/seeking and recommender systems, addressing various problems with user studies in lab and field, and building computational models with machine learning techniques. He has served as a consultant to the United Nations Data Analytics on various Data Science projects involving social and political issues, peacekeeping, climate change, and energy. He also holds a position of Amazon Scholar, working on cutting-edge research problems on personalization and recommendation with Amazon.

It’s not just a social media problem – how search engines spread misinformation

Chirag Shah, Associate Professor in the Information School, University of Washington and Founding Director of InfoSeeking Lab, which focuses on issues related to information seeking, human-computer interaction (HCI), and social media. Shah’s research describes how search engines are not just one of society’s primary gateways to information and people, but they are also conduits for misinformation. Similar to problematic social media algorithms, search engines learn to serve you what you and others have clicked on before. Because people are drawn to the sensational, this dance between algorithms and human nature can foster the spread of misinformation.

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Subjects: AI, Internet Trends, KM, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Social Media
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