Tue, 07/27/2021
The Nebraska Governance and Technology Center (NGTC) is pleased to support the work of academics in a number of fields through its various grant programs.
Dr. (Bryan) Ming Wang, Assistant Professor of Public Relations at the University of Nebraska College of Journalism, is a recipient of a supplemental grant from the NGTC, a program designed to provide additional research funding to academics that are already engaged in active internally or externally funded research at the University of Nebraska. The goal of these supplements is to facilitate consideration of law and policy topics relating to ongoing research. This effort is twofold: in the near term, to encourage researchers developing new technologies to consider potential policy aspects of their research and, in the longer term, to facilitate new interdisciplinary collaborations.
Research Context
Dr. Wang is committed to conducting theoretical research that is consequential not only for strategic communication practices but also for democratic citizenship.
More specifically, his research program explores strategic communication effects on citizen engagement in the political, social and commercial realms, focusing on two channels of influence: advertising and new media (particularly social and mobile media). He is currently studying: (1) political advertising's effects on candidate evaluations and voting behavior; (2) the use of new communication technologies in strategic communication; and (3) the effects of social and mobile media on citizen engagement.
NGTC Funded Research
Dr. Wang’s team has been conducting a social network content analysis of cancer-related posts harvested from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and other discussion forums. They have identified keywords and accounts related to each cancer myth identified by NCI and used Python to mine data with these keywords and accounts on the social media platforms identified above. His team is also conducting experiments to test how individuals process different forms of cancer health misinformation using the theoretical framework of motivated information management as well as testing how individuals interact with chatbots that communicate targeted information to help dispel misinformation.
The funding Dr. Wang has received from the NGTC is presently enabling his team to conduct a survey of the relevant law and policy regulations surrounding AI governance. As Dr. Wang explains, “these guidelines have touched upon a wide variety of topics, such as algorithmic transparency, explainable AI, and algorithmic fairness.” An analysis of these nascent and proposed regulations is necessary to understand what type of social media data his team can lawfully extract via automated data mining techniques as well as how his team can leverage AI technologies to communicate with the general public to provide accurate health information.
