Previous Member
Biography
Keith Burghardt is a Computer Scientist at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI) who researches misinformation, extremism, and complex growing systems. Burghardt is an editorial board member at Social Network Analysis and Mining and PLOS Complex Systems and has papers in several conferences, including ICWSM, ICASSP, ASONAM, AIES, and CSCW. His research has won awards including Runner-Up Best Paper Award at ASONAM 2022, Best Poster award at NIH Health Equity in Action Annual Workshop in 2023 and Best Poster Award at RCC-RD-MCD in 2022. His research has also received extensive news coverage, including from Nature Review Physics, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wired, and CNBC. Burghardt received a PhD and BS (Magna Cum Laude with High Honors) in Physics at the University of Maryland in 2016 and 2012, respectively.
Research Interests
Keith Burghardt's main research interests are in misinformation, extremism, and complex growing systems. The former two research fields combine computational social science, natural language processing, and psychology to understand the role social media plays in changing user behaviors. This includes how people are susceptible to misinformation or radicalization, as well as why people join or stay in online hate groups, the offline impacts of online radicalization, and how we can encourage people to leave hate groups and de-radicalize. The latter research field utilizes geospatial analysis, network science, and physics to understand emergent phenomena of growing systems. These findings are being actively applied to understand how extremist social networks grow.
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