Daniel Thilo Schroeder

• Doctor of Engineering
• Researcher at SINTEF

The study combines domain expertise and computational community detection to uncover what role citizen journalists and social media platforms play in mediating the dynamics of conflict in Mali. Under conditions of the growing conflict in Mali, citizen journalists are opening Twitter (rebranded as X) accounts to stay updated and tweet about the ongo...

On August 29, 2020, a precursor to the widely known Jan-uary 6 United States Capitol attack in Washington D.C., USA, occurred in Berlin, Germany, where a group of protesters participating in a demonstration against COVID-19 pandemic measures attempted to storm the German parliament in Berlin. While the event in Berlin was less dramatic than January...

With the expansion of mobile communications infrastructure, social media usage in the Global South is surging. Compared to the Global North, populations of the Global South have had less prior experience with social media from stationary computers and wired Internet. Many countries are experiencing violent conflicts that have a profound effect on t...

Recently, the surge of misinformation, especially in critical situations like the COVID-19 pandemic, presents a pressing issue. This work focuses on the network dynamics underlying a digital wildfire, the uncontrollable spread of online misinformation that ultimately leads to harmful real-world consequences. We examine the underlying temporal inter...

With the expansion of mobile communications infrastructure and the resulting proliferation of smartphones, social media usage in the Global South is surging with Twitter fast becoming an important platform. In this paper, we present what to our knowledge is the first data set of a Twitter landscape in an African country that is beset by conflict. I...

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a surge of misinformation on social media which covered a wide range of diferent topics and contained many competing narratives, including conspiracy theories. To study such conspiracy theories, we created a dataset of 3495 tweets with manual labeling of the stance of each tweet w.r.t. 12 diferent consp...

Online social networks are ubiquitous and have become an essential part of our daily lives. They not only mirror society but act as petri dishes for discourse, sometimes with fatal consequences. Understanding the dynamics underlying such platforms promises new models for predicting, e.g., the consequences of misinformation. Compared to individual-b...

The FakeNews Detection task at MediaEval 2022, running for the third time as part of the challenge, focuses on the detection of misinformation tweets and their spreaders. Like in the 2021 task, conspiracy theories related to COVID-19 in nine different categories have to be detected, along with the authors stance towards them. For the 2022 challenge...

Minimum weighted vertex cover is the NP-hard graph problem of choosing a subset of vertices incident to all edges such that the sum of the weights of the chosen vertices is minimum. Previous efforts for solving this in practice have typically been based on search-based iterative heuristics or exact algorithms that rely on reduction rules and branch...

The FakeNews: Corona Virus and Conspiracies Multimedia Analysis task, running for the second time as part of MediaEval 2021, focuses on the classification of tweet texts aiming detection of fast-spreading misinformation. Task of this year extends the number of target conspiracy theories and introduces new challenges in terms of analysis complexity...

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected the lives of people worldwide, and consequently, it has dominated world news since March 2020. Thus, it is no surprise that it has also been the topic of a massive amount of misinformation, which was most likely amplified by the fact that many details about the virus were not known at the start of the pan...

Online social networks are ubiquitous, have billions of users, and produce large amounts of data. While platforms like Reddit are based on a forum-like organization where users gather around topics, Facebook and Twitter implement a concept in which individuals represent the primary entity of interest. This makes them natural testbeds for exploring...

When a high-ranking British politician was falsely accused of child abuse by the BBC in November 2012, a wave of short messages followed on the online social network Twitter leading to considerable damage to his reputation. However, not only did the politician’s image suffer considerable damage, moreover, he was also able to sue the BBC for £185,00...

The Graphcore Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) is a newly developed processor type whose architecture does not rely on the traditional caching hierarchies. Developed to meet the need for more and more data-centric applications, such as machine learning, IPUs combine a dedicated portion of SRAM with each of its numerous cores, resulting in high me...

We review the phenomenon of deepfakes, a novel technology enabling inexpensive manipulation of video material through the use of artificial intelligence, in the context of today’s wider discussion on fake news. We discuss the foundation as well as recent developments of the technology, as well as the differences from earlier manipulation techniques...

This paper summarises the results created through participation in the task FakeNews: Corona Virus and 5G Conspiracy of the MediaEval Multimedia Evaluation Challenge 2020. The task consists of two parts intending to detect tweets and retweet cascades that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic and causally connect the radiation of 5G networks with th...

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge of misinformation has flooded social media and other internet channels, and some of it has the potential to cause real-world harm. To counteract this misinformation, reliably identifying it is a principal problem to be solved. However, the identification of misinformation poses a formidable challenge fo...

The FakeNews: Corona Virus and 5G Conspiracy task, running for the first time as part of MediaEval 2020, focuses on the classification of tweet texts and retweet cascades for the detection of fast-spreading misinformation, and therefore provides a low-threshold introduction to natural language processing and graph analysis. This paper describes the...

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge of misinformation has flooded social media and other internet channels, and some of it has the potential to cause real-world harm. To counteract this misinformation, reliably identifying it is a principal problem to be solved. However, the identification of misinformation poses a formidable challenge fo...

Huge amounts of data are collected every millisecond all around the world. This ranges from images and videos to an increasing amount of sensor data. Thus, it gets difficult for humans to decide on the most important features anymore. But reducing the feature vector is an important and necessary task to achieve higher precision in classification ta...

In the recent years, online social networks have become an important source of news and the primary place for political debates for a growing part of the population. At the same time, the spread of fake news and digital wildfires (fast-spreading and harmful misinformation) has become a growing concern worldwide, and online social networks the probl...

Distributed dataflow systems like Spark and Flink allow to analyze large datasets using clusters of computers. These frameworks provide automatic program parallelization and manage distributed workers, including worker failures. Moreover, they provide high-level programming abstractions and execute programs efficiently. Yet, the programming abstrac...

Many cloud solutions are a combination of complex components, which require a lot of time to install and to configure. This includes the setup or the adjustment of firewall policies and changes of many other system and infrastructure settings. Furthermore, additional software products are required, especially to setup a suitable and complex identit...