Dr. Amira Ghenai
Overview
Dr. Amira Ghenai is an Assistant Professor at Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management at Toronto Metropolitan University. Prior to this, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Information Studies and a member of the Accessible Computing Technologies Research Group (ACT Lab) at McGill University.
Amira completed her PhD of Computer Science at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. She also received a Masters of Computing Sciences in Software Engineering from the University of Imperial College London.
Her research interests include information retrieval, social media analysis, machine learning, misinformation, and accessibility for older adults. More specifically, she is interested in the research question of how search and social media interactions affect the human behavior in health-related decision-making process. Funded by AGEWELL - Canada's technology and aging network, she also worked on addressing the accessibility barriers faced by older adults when exploring the online health-related content.
Amira has well-established research track record with notable conference publications (such as ACM CSCW, ACM CHIIR, and ACM ICTIR). She further served as program committee member and reviewer for top-tier conferences and journals (such as JMIR, ACM CSCW, AAAI ICWSM,and ACM WWW).
- Information retrieval
- Social media analysis
- Online Communities
- Accessibility for older adults
| Research and professional contributions |
Amira Ghenai, Robin Cohen, Karyn Moffatt, Xueguang Ma, Andy Yang, Yipeng Ji, 2021, April. E- Health for Older Adults: Navigating Misinformation. The International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health. |
Robin Cohen, Karyn Moffatt, Amira Ghenai, Andy Yang, Margaret Corwin, Gary Lin, Raymond Zhao, Yipeng Ji, Alexandre Parmentier, Jason P’ng, Wil Tan, Lachlan Gray, 2020. Addressing Misinformation in Online Social Networks: Diverse Platforms and the Potential of Multiagent Trust Modeling. Information, Special issues: Tackling Misinformation Online. |
Amira Ghenai, Mark D. Smucker and Charles L. A. Clarke, 2019, July. A Think-Aloud Study about Medical Misinformation in Search Results. ACM SIGIR 2019 Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation Exposure (ROME), Paris, France. |
Amira Ghenai, Yelena Mejova, 2018, November. Fake Cures: User-centric Modeling of Health Misinformation in Social Media. The 21st ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, New York City's Hudson River (Jersey City). |
Amira Ghenai, Yelena Mejova, 2017, January. Catching Zika Fever: Application of Crowdsourcing and Machine Learning for Tracking Health Misinformation on Twitter. The Fifth IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI 2017), Park City, Utah. |
Frances Pogacar, Amira Ghenai, Mark D. Smucker, Charles L. A. Clarke., 2017, October. The Positive and Negative Influence of Search Results on People’s Decisions about the Efficacy of Medical Treatments. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval. Amsterdam. |
Amira Ghenai, 2017, June. PhD Track: Health Misinformation in Search and Social Media. In Proceedings of the 7rd ACM Digital Health Conference. London.UK. |
Amer-Yahia, S., Anjum, S., Ghenai, A., Siddique, A., Abbar, S., Madden, S., Marcus, A. and El-Haddad, M., 2012, May. Maqsa: a system for social analytics on news. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (pp. 653-656). ACM. |
| Invited Seminars, Courses, Exhibits and Presentations: |
|---|
Designing Systems to Better Address the Problem of Misinformation Women in Data Science Conference. Ottawa, ON Mar 2020 |
| A Think-Aloud Study to Understand Factors Affecting Online Health Search School of Information Studies, McGill University. Montreal, QC Oct 2019 |
| The Positive and Negative Influence of Search Results on People’s Decisions about the Efficacy of Medical Treatments Dec 2017 |
| Research collaboration talk between Waterloo university and Google Inc. Mountain View, CA Aug 2017 |
| Health Misinformation in Search and Social Media ACM SIGIR’17 conference, Tokyo. Japan Jul 2017 |
| Health Misinformation in Search and Social Media ACM Digital Health’17 conference, London. UK Sep 2016 |
| Zika Misinformation Tracking in Social Media Qatar Computing Research Institute, Doha. Qatar Nov 2015 |
What Makes a Review Useful, Funny or Cool on Yelp.com Mar 2015
|
| Grant or Project Title | Year |
|---|---|
| MITACS Globalink Research Internship | 2022 |
AGE-WELL Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Award in Technology and Aging, $20,000 over 1 year (Acceptance rate 15%) |
2020-2021 |
- PhD in Computer Science, Department of Mathematics, University of Waterloo - Waterloo, ON. Dec 2019
- Masters of Science in Computing (Software Engineering) with Merit Department of Computing, Imperial College London - London, UK. Nov 2013
- Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering with Honors, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Qatar University - Qatar. Jan 2011
- Waterloo University Graduate Research Studentship, $13,000 over two terms. 2019
- Qatar Research Leadership Doctoral Fellowship, Qatar Foundation. 2014 - 2018
- Qatar Research Leadership Program Scholarship, Qatar Foundation. 2012 - 2013
- ACM SIGIR Travel Award, ACM. 2017
- Travel Awards, Department of Computer Science, Waterloo University. 2017
- Travel Awards, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar. 2017
- Computational Social Science Summer School Travel Award, Waterloo University. 2017
- Travel Award for Grace Hopper Celebration, WiCS, Waterloo University. 2016
- MLDA Symposium Travel Award, Qatar Foundation. 2016
- Search results influence people’s decisions about treatment effectiveness Article published by Joe Petrik. Cheriton School of Computer Science News. Mar 2018
- Think twice before consulting Dr. Google, researchers say. Interview with Kelly Crowe. CBC NEWS. Apr 2018
- Is searching for health information online a good idea?. Interview with Su-Ling Goh. Global News - Edmonton. Apr 2018
- Health misinformation in online search. Interview with Mike Farwell. 570 News - The Mike Farwell Show. Apr 2018