Lecture
This Week's Discoveries | 11 June 2019
- Date
- Tuesday 11 June 2019
- Time
- Location
-
Oort
Niels Bohrweg 2
2333 CA Leiden - Room
- De Sitterzaal
First lecture
Title
The reach of commercially motivated junk news on Facebook
Speaker
Suzan Verberne (LIACS) is an assistant professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS). She is one of the supervisors of the Data Science Research Programme. With her research group, Text Mining and Retrieval, she implements and evaluates text mining and retrieval methods for complex domains and a large variety of text types.
Abstract
Commercially motivated junk news ('click bait') is a largely unexplored type of news media. Using a collection of 117 thousand Facebook posts, we compared the reach of junk news to the reach of mainstream news. During the period 2013-2017 the number of user interactions with junk news significantly exceeded that with mainstream news. Over 5 Million of the 10 Million Dutch Facebook users have interacted with a junk news post at least once.
Second lecture, Lorentz Center highlight
Title
“Mechanistic computational modelling of the aetiopathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease
Speaker
Ronan M.T. Fleming (LACDR) is an assistant professor in the Division of Systems Biomedicine and Pharmacology. His fundamental interest is to develop scalable mathematical and numerical analysis techniques that increase the predictive fidelity of biomolecular network models, by incorporating physico-chemical constraints, motivated by optimality principles.
Abstract
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease with a lifetime incidence of 1 in 15. As yet, there are no clinically proven treatment to slow or stop disease progression. This talk will introduce new computational modelling approaches to understand the mechanisms of disease progression and how they can be used with experimental data to predict potential targets for new therapies.