Research Projects

We actively participate in various media-related research projects. We conduct interdisciplinary studies on the broad topics of News Analytics, Data Journalism, and Misinformation.

Media in the Digital Age

We co-organize Media in the Digital Age, a special interest group coordinated by the Alan Turing Institute (UK). We host several events during the year with the goal of fostering interdisciplinary research and collaboration with media practitioners.

  • Mediate is a workshop on Social and News Media Misinformation held at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM).
  • Framing is a colloquium on Narrative Framing and its Linguistic Forms in Online Media held at the Communication in Multicultural Society Conference (CMSC).

NRP77

We participate in the National Research Programme Digital Transformation (NRP 77), in which we systematically analyze the news diet of young adults in Switzerland and examine what the changes mean for professional journalism.

Media Laboratory

Media Laboratory is a initiative aiming to develop data-journalism in Switzerland. We provide a virtual space (the Laboratory) for journalists, engineers and students to collaborate on data-visualization projects. The laboratory hosts the resulting visualizations, update them automatically and makes it easy to embed them in news articles. The initiative intends to lay the first stone of a long-term strategical collaboration across organizations by creating new bridges between academic institutions and the news industry.

The Laboratory is still under development and testing. However, you can find below a few examples of data-visualizations in the Swiss medias.

Combating Online Scientific Misinformation

The drastic shift towards digital communication in our mediasphere has caused a profound change in the production and consumption of information, which in turn has substantial implications on the social and political landscape. Misinformation, as a side effect of mass information diffusion, has become a fundamental problem for governments, platforms, and the general public in light of critical events such as elections, pandemics, and wars. In this project, we focus on the problem of online scientific misinformation, proposing methods that tackle the problem at different granularity levels: at the level of claims, articles, and sources.


  • [ICWSM'23]
    SciLander: Mapping the Scientific News Landscapepaper
    Maurício Gruppi, Panayiotis Smeros, Sibel Adali, Carlos Castillo, Karl Aberer
  • [CIKM'21]
    SciClops: Detecting and Contextualizing Scientific Claimspaper
    Panayiotis Smeros, Carlos Castillo, Karl Aberer
  • [VLDB'20]
    SciLens News Platform: A System for Real-Time Evaluation of News Articlespaper
    Angelika Romanou, Panayiotis Smeros, Carlos Castillo, Karl Aberer
  • [WWW'19]
    SciLens: Evaluating the Quality of Scientific News Articlespaper
    Panayiotis Smeros, Carlos Castillo, Karl Aberer

Media Observatory

Media Observatory is a research effort for the automatic mapping of news sources based on their selection of subjects. By tracking sources' evolution over time, our model identifies driving forces, from the influence of ownership to large-scale content diffusion patterns. We release an open and interactive map based on these insights, which can be used by anyone, from viewers to journalists.

  • [WWW'19]
    A Dynamic Embedding Model of the Media Landscapepaper
    Jérémie Rappaz, Dylan Bourgeois, Karl Aberer
  • [WWW'18]
    Selection Bias in News Coverage: Learning it, Fighting itpaper
    Dylan Bourgeois, Jérémie Rappaz, Karl Aberer