Short Biography

Hi, I'm Lia. I grew up in the West Coast and earned my bachelors in computer science from the University of Washington, Seattle. Post undergrad, I worked in the industry (Amazon & Google) as a software engineer for a few years. I'm currently a 5th year doctoral candidate at University of Michigan, School of Information. My advisor is Ceren Budak.

Contact Information

Email: lbozarth AT umich DOT edu

Research Interest

I'm interested in applying computational methods to study and address pitfalls and safeguards in online political communications. My most recent studies focus on fake news including but not limited to 1) examine to what extent different groundtruth labels impact downstream analysis, 2) evaluate performance of and biases in existing fake news models, and 3) explore potential methods that can effectively curtail fake news. Additionally, my other research projects include studying online social movements and politicians' social media strategies and outcome.

Publications

Lia Bozarth, Ceren Budak, "Market Forces: Quantifying the Role of Top Credible Ad Servers in the Fake News Ecosystem", forthcoming, ICWSM (2021) Download

Lia Bozarth, Ceren Budak, "Beyond the Eye-Catchers: a Large-Scale Study of Social Movement Organizations' Involvement in Online Protests", in proceedings, New Media & Society (2020). Download

Lia Bozarth, Ceren Budak, "Toward a Better Performance Evaluation Framework for Fake News Classification", in proceedings, ICWSM(2020).Download

Lia Bozarth, Aparajita Saraf, Ceren Budak, "Higher Ground? How Groundtruth Labeling Impacts Our Understanding of Fake News about the 2016 U.S. Presidential Nominees", in proceedings, ICWSM (2020). Download

Lia Bozarth, Anmol Panda, Joyojeet Pal, "From Greetings to Corruption: Politicians, Political Parties, and Tweeting in India", in proceedings, ICTD (2020) Download

Lia Bozarth, Joyojeet Pal, "Twitter Discourse as a Lens into Politicians' Interest in Technology and Development", in proceedings, ICTDX (2018). Download

Lia Bozarth, Ceren Budak, "Is Slacktivism Underrated? Measuring the Value of Slacktivists for Online Social Movements", in proceedings, ICWSM (2017). Download

Awards & In the Press

Lia Bozarth, Ceren Budak, "Profit for You and Me: Exploring Ad Servers on Fake News Sites", Best poster for the category "Most Likely to Make a Societal Impact", MIDAS Symposium (2019) Award Link

Joyojeet Pal, Lia Bozarth, "How Modi lost his mojo and Rahul roared to life on Twitter", Quartz (2018). Article Link

Joyojeet Pal, Lia Bozarth, "Is Tweeting in Indian Languages Helping Politicians Widen Their Reach?", Economic and Political Weekly (2018). Download

Academic Service

Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) at University of Michigan

Coordinator for the Computational Social Science Methods (CSSM) Reading Group at UMSI

Served as facilitator for SI's LGBTQ student group.

Served as a student representative within the Student Life and Academic Affairs subcommittees in Rackham Student Government at the University level.