A Hunter College researcher is one of nine CUNY faculty members receiving funding from Google as part of a three-year, $3 million grant from the company.
Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sarah Ita Levitan, who also holds an appointment at the CUNY Graduate Center for Computer Science and Linguistics, won the award for her research project “News or Opinion: Fine-Grained Analysis of Text Data to Inform Online Readers.” She shares the grant with co-principal investigator Shweta Jain, an associate professor of Computer Science at the Graduate Center and John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“We are deeply grateful to Google and CUNY for the opportunity to work on this project, which will advance research in Natural Language Processing and foster connections between NLP and Cybersecurity,” Levitan said.
The project aims to develop computational models that help users determine the trustworthiness of online content by distinguishing between opinions and facts in text. As trust in media declines and the spread of fake news and misinformation rises, it is critical to develop tools to help identify potentially untrustworthy content.
By creating tools that highlight subjective (opinion) versus objective (factual) language, and provide supporting evidence for the labels, the project promotes transparency and empowers users to make more informed judgments.
The grant, announced last year, is part of the Google Cyber NYC Institutional Research Program, which was created to enhance cybersecurity research and education and establish New York City as the global leader in cybersecurity. The program supports innovative research projects that address pressing challenges in the cybersecurity field.
This year’s winning projects — each of which will receive $80,000 in direct funding and another $20,000 in Google Cloud services — are led by 11 faculty members from nine CUNY campuses.
Chosen from a competitive pool of 23 proposals, the projects reflect the broad expertise and innovative research of Graduate Center and CUNY faculty. A rigorous selection process included a CUNY-level double-blind review by five internal and external reviewers, with the top 13 proposals recommended to Google. From these, nine projects were selected for funding based on their merits and alignment with Google’s research mission.
