The Center for Publics, Platforms & Personalization annual joint work session will be held February 7–9, 2025 at the University of Iowa.

Rishab Nithyanand, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, will build computational tools to assist regulatory agencies with data privacy enforcement.

Ryan Stoldt, assistant professor at Drake University, was featured in an article by Wired. Group chats might be ad-free and relatively controlled social environments, but they come with their own biases. “If you look at sociology, we've seen a lot of research that shows that people naturally seek out things that don't cause cognitive dissonance,” says Stoldt.

Ekdale and Nithyanand are examining social media platform vulnerabilities and mitigation strategies to strategic information operations (SIOs) in the United States, Central and Eastern Europe, and East Africa.

Brian Ekdale and his co-investigators will use qualitative, quantitative, and computational research methodologies to investigate the psychological attributes that make a person vulnerable to radicalization and how U.S. users of various social media respond to personalization and radical content.