Alegion Sponsors University of Texas at Austin AI Hackathon

Hackathon Seeks to Solve Rise of Online Misinformation with Hybrid AI+Human Approaches


AUSTIN, Texas, March 06, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Alegion, a training data platform for enterprise machine-learning projects, announced its sponsorship of the “Designing Good AI+Human Systems to Curb Misinformation” hackathon, held February 15-22, 2019 at the University of Texas at Austin. The company contributed to the monetary prizes for the hackathon’s first- and second-place teams.

In a rising tide of interest in fake news and how to prevent it, UT Austin hosted a hackathon with the aim of developing novel systems to stem the rise of misinformation and disinformation online. Participants were encouraged to explore hybrid AI+human systems to address the problem. A “grand challenge” of UT Austin, the hackathon engaged interdisciplinary groups to solve a pressing social crisis.

“We are proud to be sponsors of the University of Texas AI Hackathon,” said Kevin Dodds, Director of Solutions Architecture at Alegion and an AI hackathon juror. “Our participation underscores our commitment to fostering education in support of the future of AI. It was particularly gratifying to be involved with a project that so obviously bolsters the quality of online information and broadly helps societies worldwide.”

Both of the winning teams focused on social media. One produced a machine intelligence system for raising misinformation alerts. The other developed a fact-checking system to be used to provide factual counter-arguments to suspected disinformation.

About Alegion

Alegion is an Austin-based technology company that provides a ML training-data platform and services that span the ML project lifecycle, integrating human intelligence into the creation of high-quality training data, model scoring and validation, and exception handling. The Alegion platform helps enterprises accelerate confidence in their AI initiatives and mitigate their risk using proven technologies, on-demand workforces and methodologies. For more information, visit www.alegion.com.

Contact:

Caitlin Haskins
10Fold Communications
Alegion@10fold.com
925-271-8219