Miriam Fernandez




Bio. Dr Miriam Fernandez is a Senior Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi),
Open University, and a member of KMi's Social Data Science Group. Before joining KMi, she
was research associate at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain and software engineer (in-
ternship) at Google Zurich, Switzerland. Her research is at the intersection of the Web Science
(WS) and Semantic Web communities (SW), where she has contributed with more than 100 peer-
reviewed articles in various leading conferences and journals. She has extensive expertise in
leading EU and national projects. She frequently participates in organising committees and edi-
torial boards of the top SW and WS conferences, recently being program co-chair of the Interna-
tional Semantic Web conference in 2017, and serving as editor for the Journal of Web Semantics.
Dr. Fernandez is the Athena SWAN champion for KMi, leading key initiatives to increase equal-
ity diversity in higher education.




     Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons
                    License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
    Targeting Societal Challenges by analysing social media data.

                                       Miriam Fernandez

                    Senior Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute

Abstract. The Social Web has become one of the largest human information and communication
systems in history, impacting the lives of billions of people around the world. This social phe-
nomenon is transforming the world in ways that were never imagined, shaping how we com-
municate and share information, how we engage with others, or how we elect governments. In
this talk we discuss how, by mining this unprecedented resource, we can help targeting societal
challenges, with a particular focus on the problems of radicalisation and misinformation.