Twitter’s cooperation with the study was a good start. In a perspective paper published alongside the study, David Lazer of Northeastern University and Matthew Baum of the Harvard Kennedy School are now calling for more cooperation among social media companies and academics to get a handle on the anything-but-fake problem.

Identifying basic emotions in others — like fear, sadness or anger — seems instinctive, but psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett says we’re doing more guesswork than we think. Lisa Feldman Barrett is Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She has studied emotion in the brain for […]

“We can’t shy away from phrases because they’ve been somehow weaponized. We have to stick to our guns and say there is a real phenomenon here,” said David Lazer, one of the authors of the essay and a professor of political science and computer science at Northeastern University.

More than half of Americans (58%) believe that artificial intelligence poses a greater threat to U.S. jobs over the next 10 years than immigration and offshoring (42%,) according to a new Northeastern University/Gallup survey.

Society often reinforces an uncritical view of information, says David Lazer, a professor of political science and computer and information science at Northeastern University, who was not involved in the new research but co-wrote a commentary that ran alongside it.

David Lazer, a political and computer scientist at Northeastern University who wasn’t part of the study but wrote an accompanying report, praised the MIT research but said the scientists may have missed a lot of bots and cyborgs — sort of in-between humans. His ongoing, not-yet-published research has found that about 80 percent of false […]

Not to be denied, many researchers get creative. To determine how many and where ride-hail vehicles were operating in San Francisco in late 2016, savvy Northeastern University data scientists tracked drivers looking for riders by systematically pinging Uber and Lyft APIs every five seconds. From there, the agency extrapolated the vehicles’ movements around the city. […]