Research

Claudia Flores-Saviaga is a PhD student in the HCI Lab in the Computer Science Department at West Virginia University, where she is advised by Dr. Saiph Savage.

Her research involves the areas of HCI, Machine Learning, Crowdsourcing and Social Computing. She is interested in understanding how “bad actors” organize misinformation and propaganda messages, and how other citizens organize to debunk those rumors and influence campaigns. She started her exploration of online spaces analyzing how political trolls were organizing during the 2016 US presidential elections. She developed novel probabilistic graphical models to uncover how the most active political trolls drove people to action. Her research has been covered by the Associated Press, Newsweek, Salon, among others. Recently, she used quantitative methods to study at scale how the Latino community was being targeted across social media platforms during the 2018 midterm election as part of a collaboration with the Institute for the Future (IFF). Her research has caught the attention and has received funding support from different think tanks in the US such as the Atlantic Council and the National Democratic Institute. Previously, she worked as a technology consultant, project manager, and strategy adviser to the Lieutenant Governor of the State of Veracruz in Mexico. She has also collaborated with Mexico’s presidency and top universities in Latin America, such as the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). This has empowered Claudia to be able to study online political ecosystems across languages.

For links to papers, videos, and open-sourced code visit her webpage.