Full Name
Tanushree (Tanu) Mitra
Job Title
Assistant Professor
Company
Virginia Tech, Department of Computer Science
Speaker Bio
Tanushree (Tanu) Mitra is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, where she leads the Social Computing research group. She and her students study and build large-scale social computing systems to address information disorders in social media platforms. Tanu is particularly interested in addressing socially relevant problems which are created by social computing technologies and which are often amplified by participation in online social platforms. Her recent endeavors include auditing online systems for misinformation and conspiratorial content, understanding digital misinformation in the context of the news ecosystem, unraveling narratives underlying online extremism, and building technology designs to foster critical thinking while consuming news and information online. Her work uses a range of interdisciplinary methods from the fields of human computer interaction, data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing. Her research has been recognized through multiple awards and honors, including an NSF-CRII award, an ICTAS Junior Faculty Award, an Honorable Mention at ACM SIGCHI, an IBM PhD fellowship, and GVU Center’s Foley Scholarship for research innovation and potential impact. Many of her academic contributions have received widespread press coverage by notable news outlets.
Tanushree (Tanu) Mitra