Professor Chiu Ming Ming, Chair Professor of Analytics and Diversity at The Education University of Hong Kong, has been named an awardee under the Research Grants Council’s (RGC) Senior Research Fellow Scheme (SRFS) 2022/23 in recognition of his remarkable research capabilities and the potential impact of his proposed research project, titled ‘Detecting COVID-19 fake news on social media across four languages: followers, emotions, relationships, and uncertainty’.

Fake news or misinformation related to the pandemic has misled people to eschew the vaccine, masks and social distancing, thus putting public health at risk. Professor Chiu’s research aims to create a first-generation COVID-19 information-assessment dashboard for publicly available social media messages. The research will:

1. Develop information theory to identify COVID-19 tweets linked to fake news and its dissemination within and across networks;
2. Operationalise this theoretical model with artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) and advanced statistics;
3. Determine how COVID-19 tweets spread within and across communities (scope, speed, and shape) and their antecedents across levels; and
4. Create an AI/ML-based dashboard to track the diffusion of COVID fake news tweets within and across online communities in real time.

The SRFS aims to provide support to exceptionally outstanding researchers at the Associate Professor rank (or full Professor rank) at UGC-funded universities, to facilitate their research and development while helping universities attract and retain research talent. In each round of the annual exercise, the SRFS will provide 10 places encompassing all academic disciplines and confer each SRFS awardee the title ‘RGC Senior Research Fellow’. The supporting university will receive a fellowship grant of about HK$7.8 million per award over 60 months.