Misinformation during a national emergency is not new. In this current health crisis, the “coronavirus pandemic is generating a tidal wave of information—some of it accurate, some not so much—that has saturated social and traditional media,” as was stated in Science Magazine last week.  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently held a session at AAAS called Detecting, Combating, and Identifying Dis and Mis-information. One of the speakers was Emma Spiro (University of Washington), who spoke on Misinformation in the Context of Emergencies and Disaster Events. Rumors, defined by Spiro as a “story that is unverified at the time of communication,” are widely spread during crisis events as people seek out […]

In two weeks you are hosting 1,800 scientists, engineers, designers, and other experts at a five day conference but then the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suddenly encourages Americans to practice “social distancing” measures to prevent the further spread of COVID-19. What do you do?  You move it online.  That is what the IEEE VR conference chairs decided to do last month, led by Blair MacIntyre, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing and IEEE VR conference co-chair, and Kyle Johnsen, an associate professor in the University of Georgia’s College of Engineering, when they transitioned the IEEE VR 2020 Conference to an all-virtual event. Working non-stop […]