People use the Internet to diagnose themselves—Can this UMBC student’s work help moderate medical content on the web?

In 2024, information systems Ph.D. student Ommo Clark penned an opinion piece for BusinessDay Nigeria exploring why many Nigerians diagnose and treat their medical conditions themselves, often turning to unreliable online information.

While the essay was inspired by firsthand experiences in her native country, the impulse to consult “Dr. Google” is a worrying global trend, Clark says, and one that has motivated her Ph.D. work. It’s unlikely that people will stop going online with health questions, so Clark is researching ways that AI could help patients, healthcare providers, public health officials, and content platforms better understand and evaluate the sea of medically related content on the Internet.

Ommo’s efforts were recently recognized when one of her research papers, co-authored with information systems professor Karuna Joshi, won the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Digital Health 2025, held in July in Helsinki, Finland. The paper, titled “Real-Time Detection of Online Health Misinformation using an Integrated Knowledgegraph-LLM Approach,” describes the results of combining two types of AI approaches to tackle the problem of identifying online health misinformation.

Read more about their work in this UMBC News article.

]]> In 2024, information systems Ph.D. student Ommo Clark penned an opinion piece for BusinessDay Nigeria exploring why many Nigerians diagnose and treat their medical conditions themselves, often... https://umbc.edu/stories/ai-moderating-online-medical-information/ https://beta.my.umbc.edu/api/v0/pixel/news/151542/guest@my.umbc.edu/d63c683a1212db0b977f1a55ada16094/api/pixel ai health misinformation online research umbc UMBC AI https://beta.my.umbc.edu/groups/umbc-ai https://assets4-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xsmall.png?1691095779 https://assets2-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/original.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xxlarge.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xlarge.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/large.png?1691095779 https://assets3-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/medium.png?1691095779 https://assets3-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/small.png?1691095779 https://assets4-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xsmall.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xxsmall.png?1691095779 UMBC AI https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/151/542/899c1c8a781f99a484216fa7c9addd7f/xxlarge.jpg?1755464559 https://assets3-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/151/542/899c1c8a781f99a484216fa7c9addd7f/xlarge.jpg?1755464559 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/151/542/899c1c8a781f99a484216fa7c9addd7f/large.jpg?1755464559 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/151/542/899c1c8a781f99a484216fa7c9addd7f/medium.jpg?1755464559 https://assets4-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/151/542/899c1c8a781f99a484216fa7c9addd7f/small.jpg?1755464559 https://assets3-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/151/542/899c1c8a781f99a484216fa7c9addd7f/xsmall.jpg?1755464559 https://assets2-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/151/542/899c1c8a781f99a484216fa7c9addd7f/xxsmall.jpg?1755464559 Healthcare working holding a Google input device. 6 0 true Sun, 17 Aug 2025 17:22:27 -0400 UMBC PhD student Ommo Clark wins best paper award with Karuna Joshi Detecting misinformation with LLMs and Knowledge Graphs A research paper by UMBC Information Systems PhD student Ommo Clark co-authored with her advisor Professor Karuna Joshi received the Best Student Paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Digital Health held earlier this month in Helsinki as part of the IEEE Services Congress.

The paper addressed the problem of identifying health misinformation on social media platforms, which poses a threat to public health by contributing to hesitancy in vaccines, delayed medical interventions, and the adoption of untested or harmful treatments. 

Clark and Joshi evaluated their hybrid approach to combining LLM and knowledge-graph technologies on a dataset of Reddit posts discussing chronic health conditions, and showed the benefits compared to models that only use text or knowledge-graphs. Their paper, Real-Time Detection of Online Health Misinformation using an Integrated KnowledgeGraph-LLM Approach, is available here.


]]> A research paper by UMBC Information Systems PhD student Ommo Clark co-authored with her advisor Professor Karuna Joshi received the Best Student Paper award at the IEEE International Conference... https://ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/1193/Real-Time-Detection-of-Online-Health-Misinformation-using-an-Integrated-Knowledgegraph-LLM-Approach https://beta.my.umbc.edu/api/v0/pixel/news/151217/guest@my.umbc.edu/87be4179805dd18174504aefdd4b88c1/api/pixel ai knowledge-graph misinformation nlp UMBC AI https://beta.my.umbc.edu/groups/umbc-ai https://assets4-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xsmall.png?1691095779 https://assets2-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/original.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xxlarge.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xlarge.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/large.png?1691095779 https://assets3-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/medium.png?1691095779 https://assets3-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/small.png?1691095779 https://assets4-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xsmall.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xxsmall.png?1691095779 UMBC AI https://assets3-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/151/217/56a5e670afb49155d0a9e35a1f91f67e/xxlarge.jpg?1753912567 https://assets3-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/151/217/56a5e670afb49155d0a9e35a1f91f67e/xlarge.jpg?1753912567 https://assets3-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/151/217/56a5e670afb49155d0a9e35a1f91f67e/large.jpg?1753912567 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/151/217/56a5e670afb49155d0a9e35a1f91f67e/medium.jpg?1753912567 https://assets4-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/151/217/56a5e670afb49155d0a9e35a1f91f67e/small.jpg?1753912567 https://assets2-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/151/217/56a5e670afb49155d0a9e35a1f91f67e/xsmall.jpg?1753912567 https://assets2-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/thumbnails/news/000/151/217/56a5e670afb49155d0a9e35a1f91f67e/xxsmall.jpg?1753912567 Paper by Ommo Clark and Karuna Joshi receives award 0 0 true Wed, 30 Jul 2025 18:20:20 -0400 AI Lunchbox: AI, misinformation & disinformation, 12-1 5/16

This week's UMBC Training Centers AI Lunchbox session is on how new AI systems spread both misinformation and  disinformation. Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information that can include inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, or false information and selective or half-truths but is distributed without the intention to mislead.  Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people.

AI systems have evolved dramatically to the point where anyone can emulate another person's speech, language, and image at little to no cost. A significant downside is the explosion of content meant to deceive others. 

Join the UMBC Training Centers for this free lunchtime session as Ed Melick examines AI disinformation/misinformation and what you can do to inform and protect yourself.

Register here for this session, 12-1pm ET Thursday, May 16, 2024.

UMBC Center for AI ]]> This week's UMBC Training Centers AI Lunchbox session is on how new AI systems spread both misinformation and  disinformation. Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information that can... https://www.meetup.com/c4a-ai/events/300438326/ https://beta.my.umbc.edu/api/v0/pixel/news/141999/guest@my.umbc.edu/a6e15a9625bb4ce488763526c97413db/api/pixel ai disinformation misinformation UMBC AI https://beta.my.umbc.edu/groups/umbc-ai https://assets4-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xsmall.png?1691095779 https://assets2-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/original.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xxlarge.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xlarge.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/large.png?1691095779 https://assets3-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/medium.png?1691095779 https://assets3-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/small.png?1691095779 https://assets4-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xsmall.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xxsmall.png?1691095779 UMBC AI 0 0 true Wed, 15 May 2024 10:36:33 -0400 Talk: Influencing Societies via Narrative Construction, 4/12 Dr. Anupam Joshi on misinformation, disinformation & LLMs
The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Shaping Opinion and Influencing Societies through Narrative Construction


Anupam Joshi
CSEE Professor and Acting CoEIT Dean

12–1pm, Friday, April 12, 2024 via WebEx

There has been a significant body of work that explores “misinformation” or “disinformation” in the media. Research has explored how to identify misinformation, and how it spreads or goes viral. When detected, individual pieces of misinformation can be debunked. However, there is evidence that state actors (and others) are starting to launch more sophisticated information operations that try to craft a narrative that will shape public opinion. This involves combining factual information/hard news with opinions and potentially small elements of disinformation to persuade people, particularly in open societies typically found in democracies. While such influence building operations have been a tradition in statecraft, the ability to spread information fast provided by social media, and the removal of gatekeepers from the more traditional media sources, have provided a new potency to this approach. In this talk, we'll talk about disinformation, how easy it is to generate plausible “facts” in the era of Large Language Models, and narrative constructions. We'll also describe our recent work (with PhD student Priyanka Ranade) in creating computational approaches that might detect when a narrative is being constructed.

Anupam Joshi is the Oros Family Professor and Acting Dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).  He also serves as the Director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity.  He was previously the Chair of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department, and is an Adjunct Professor at IIT Delhi's School of IT.  He is a Fellow of IEEE and of the InCSCoE. He has published over 300 technical papers with an h-index of 91 and over 32,000 citations (per Google scholar), been granted nine patents, and has obtained research support over $22M from National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), US Dept of Defense (DoD), NIST, IBM, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin amongst others.

Dr. Joshi obtained a B.Tech degree from IIT Delhi in 1989, and a Masters and Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1991 and 1993 respectively. His research interests are at the intersection of AI and Systems. He did some of the earliest work in data management and security for mobile and ad-hoc networks using AI approaches. Over the last decade, he has been exploring this intersection to improve Cybersecurity—using Distributed AI approaches for attack detection and resilience in CPS/IoT systems, and policy driven approaches to security and privacy. This work has led not just to papers but technology transfer to small Maryland companies. 

Host: Alan T. Sherman, sherman@umbc.edu. Support for this event was provided in part by the NSF under SFS grant DGE-1753681.

 
]]> The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents Shaping Opinion and Influencing Societies through Narrative Construction Anupam Joshi CSEE Professor and Acting CoEIT Dean 12–1pm, Friday, April... https://beta.my.umbc.edu/api/v0/pixel/news/140638/guest@my.umbc.edu/a4a284c335dd9fa66d2dd0ec9dd59961/api/pixel ai disinformation llm misinformation UMBC AI https://beta.my.umbc.edu/groups/umbc-ai https://assets4-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xsmall.png?1691095779 https://assets2-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/original.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xxlarge.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xlarge.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/large.png?1691095779 https://assets3-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/medium.png?1691095779 https://assets3-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/small.png?1691095779 https://assets4-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xsmall.png?1691095779 https://assets1-beta.my.umbc.edu/system/shared/avatars/groups/000/002/081/cfb27ebe008c2636486089a759ea5c36/xxsmall.png?1691095779 UMBC AI 0 0 true Sun, 07 Apr 2024 15:18:27 -0400 Sun, 07 Apr 2024 15:35:14 -0400