RGC Senior Research Fellow Scheme

Biography

Chair Professor of Analytics and Diversity in Department of Special Education and Counselling and Director of the Analytics\Assessment Research Centre at The Education University of Hong Kong
Invention of (a) statistical discourse analysis (SDA) to model conversations, (b) multilevel diffusion analysis (MDA) to detect the spread of ideas, (c) statistics artificial intelligence expert system (SAIES) for automatic statistics analyses, and (d) online detection of sexual predators
SRFS project — to introduce and test a theoretical model of deceptive writing strategies in Twitter tweets linked to COVID-19 fake news in four languages (English, Chinese, Korean, French), its antecedents, and its dissemination scope and speed within and across online communities. By integrating linguistics, communication and psychology theories, artificial intelligence, and statistics, he will model linguistic attributes of fake news and build a user-friendly dashboard, predict its dissemination scope and speed, inform interventions, and save lives
Awards and Honours:
- RGC Senior Research Fellow (2022)
- EdUHK President’s Award for Outstanding Performance in Knowledge Transfer (2020)
- Best Empirical Paper, Group & Organization Management (2018)

Project Title

Detecting COVID-19 Fake News on Social Media across Four Languages: Followers, Emotions, Relationships, and Uncertainty

Award Citation

Ming Ming CHIU is Chair Professor of Analytics and Diversity and Analytics\Assessment Research Centre Director, The Education University of Hong Kong. He is Senior Advisor to South Korea's Minister of Corporations, and advises Qatar’s Ministry of Education and China’s Ministry of Education. He invented (a) statistical discourse analysis to model online and face-to-face conversations (top 50 learning sciences idea – International Society of the Learning Sciences), (b) multilevel diffusion analysis to detect how different ideas spread within and across different populations, (c) statistics artificial intelligence expert system (SAIES) for automatic statistics analyses, and (d) online detection of sexual predators. His 77 grants (HK$129 million) yielded 265 publications (176 journal articles; 13,000+ citations; #8 in Education and #46 in Psychology in China, 2021), 13 keynote speeches, 5 television broadcasts, 17 radio broadcasts, and 170 news articles in 21 countries. He creates automatic statistics analyses for Big Data.

While the current pandemic has infected and killed millions of people, COVID-19 fake news persuaded many people to reject protective measures (vaccines, masks, social distancing, etc.), so many of them were unnecessarily infected and died. Chiu created a theoretical model of fake news, invented statistical and artificial intelligence methods to analyze it, and demonstrated 95% accuracy in a pilot study detecting COVID-19 fake news.

In this project, Chiu introduces and tests a theoretical model of deceptive writing strategies in Twitter tweets linked to COVID-19 fake news in four languages (English, Chinese, Korean, and French), its antecedents, and its dissemination scope and speed within and across online communities. By integrating linguistics, communication and psychology theories, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and statistics, the project will model linguistic attributes of fake news and build a user-friendly dashboard to detect COVID-19 fake news, predict its dissemination scope and speed, inform interventions, and save lives.