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Amplifying true news info on social media without shielding bias + New method for QC

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Researchers find new way to amplify trustworthy news content on social media without shielding bias
https://www.usf.edu/news/2022/researcher...-bias.aspx

RELEASE: Social media sites continue to amplify misinformation and conspiracy theories. To address this concern, an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, physicists and social scientists led by the University of South Florida (USF) has found a solution to ensure social media users are exposed to more reliable news sources.

In their study published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, the researchers focused on the recommendation algorithm that is used by social media platforms to prioritize content displayed to users. Rather than measuring engagement based on the number of users and pageviews, the researchers looked at what content gets amplified on a newsfeed, focusing on a news source's reliability score and the political diversity of their audience.

"Low-quality content is engaging because it conforms to what we already know and like, regardless of whether it is accurate or not," said Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at USF. "As a result, misinformation and conspiracy theories often go viral within like-minded audiences. The algorithm ends up picking the wrong signal and keeps promoting it further. To break this cycle, one should look for content that is engaging, but for a diverse audience, not for a like-minded one."

In collaboration with researchers at Indiana University and Dartmouth College, the team created a new algorithm using data on the web traffic and self-reported partisanship of 6,890 individuals who reflect the diversity of the United States in sex, race and political affiliation. The data was provided by online polling company YouGov. They also reviewed the reliability scores of 3,765 news sources based on the NewGuard Reliability Index, which rates news sources on several journalistic criteria, such as editorial responsibility, accountability and financial transparency.

They found that incorporating the partisan diversity of a news audience can increase the reliability of recommended sources while still providing users with relevant recommendations. Since the algorithm isn't exclusively based on engagement or popularity, it is still able to promote reliable sources, regardless of their partisanship.

"This is especially welcome news for social media platforms, especially since they have been reluctant of introducing changes to their algorithms for fear of criticism about partisan bias," said co-author Filippo Menczer, distinguished Luddy professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University.

Researchers say that platforms would easily be able to include audience diversity into their own recommendation algorithms because diversity measures can be derived from engagement data, and platforms already log this type of data whenever users click "like" or share something on a newsfeed. Ciampaglia and his colleagues propose social media platforms adopt this new strategy in order to help prevent the spread of misinformation.


A new method for quantum computing
https://iop.uva.nl/content/news/2022/01/...uting.html

RELEASE: Physicists from the University of Amsterdam have proposed a new architecture for a scalable quantum computer. Making use of the collective motion of the constituent particles, they were able to construct new building blocks for quantum computing that pose fewer technical difficulties than current state-of-the art methods. The results were recently published in Physical Review Letters.

The researchers work at QuSoft and the Institute of Physics in the groups of Rene Gerritsma and Arghavan Safavi-Naini. The effort, which was led by the PhD candidate Matteo Mazzanti, combines two important ingredients. One is a so-called trapped-ion platform, one of the most promising candidates for quantum computing that makes use of ions – atoms that have either a surplus or a shortage of electrons and as a result are electrically charged. The other is the use of a clever method to control the ions supplied by optical tweezers and oscillating electric fields.

As the name suggests, trapped-ion quantum computers use a crystal of trapped ions. These ions can move individually, but more importantly, also as a whole. As it turns out, the possible collective motions of the ions facilitate the interactions between individual pairs of ions. In the proposal, this idea is made concrete by applying a uniform electric field to the whole crystal, in order to mediate interactions between two specific ions in that crystal. The two ions are selected by applying tweezer potentials on them – see the image above. The homogeneity of the electric field assures that it will only allow the two ions to move together with all other ions in the crystal. As a result, the interaction strength between the two selected ions is fixed, regardless of how far apart the two ions are.

A quantum computer consists of ‘gates’, small computational building blocks that perform quantum analogues of operations like ‘and’ and ‘or’ that we know from ordinary computers. In trapped-ion quantum computers, these gates act on the ions, and their operation depends on the interactions between these particles. In the above setup, the fact that those interactions do not depend on the distance means that also the duration of operation of a gate is independent of that distance. As a result, this scheme for quantum computing is inherently scalable, and compared to other state-of-the-art quantum computing schemes poses fewer technical challenges for achieving comparably well-operating quantum computers.
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