Computer Science researchers receive the best paper award at the 2018 IMC

The paper received the best paper award at the 2018 Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), held in Boston this week. 

Internet memes are increasingly used to sway and manipulate public opinion. This prompts the need to study their propagation, evolution, and in?uence across the Web. In the paper, the researchers detect and measure the propagation of memes across multiple Web communities, using a processing pipeline based on perceptual hashing and clustering techniques, and a dataset of 160 million images from 2.6 billion posts gathered from Twitter, Reddit, 4chan’s Politically Incorrect board, and Gab, over the course of 13 months.

Dr Emiliano De Cristofaro, Associate Professor in Security and Privacy Enhancing Technologies, said:"This paper provides a first-of-its-kind way to study 'weaponized' memes and how they are used by different web communities to push political, racist, and anti-semitic agendas. We are releasing the datasets and the source code of our pipeline and we hope other researchers, possibly from other disciplines, can build on them."

The full paper is available online: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.12512.pdf. 

IMC is a three-day event focusing on Internet measurement and analysis. The conference is sponsored by ACM SIGCOMM. IMC 2018 is the 18th in a series of highly successful Internet Measurement Workshops and Conferences