Characterizing the Emotion Carriers of COVID-19 Misinformation and Their Impact on Vaccination Outcomes in India and the United States

The COVID-19 Infodemic had an unprecedented impact on health behaviors and outcomes at a global scale. While many studies have focused on a qualitative and quantitative understanding of misinformation, including sentiment analysis, there is a gap in understanding the emotion-carriers of misinformation and their differences across geographies. In this study, we characterized emotion carriers and their impact on vaccination rates in India and the United States. A manually labelled dataset was created from 2.3 million tweets and collated with three publicly available datasets (CoAID, AntiVax, CMU) to train deep learning models for misinformation classification. Misinformation labelled tweets were further analyzed for behavioral aspects by leveraging Plutchik Transformers to determine the emotion for each tweet. Time series analysis was conducted to study the impact of misinformation on spatial and temporal characteristics. Further, categorical classification was performed using transformer models to assign categories for the misinformation tweets. Word2Vec+BiLSTM was the best model for misinformation classification, with an F1-score of 0.92. The US had the highest proportion of misinformation tweets (58.02%), followed by the UK (10.38%) and India (7.33%). Disgust, anticipation, and anger were associated with an increased prevalence of misinformation tweets. Disgust was the predominant emotion associated with misinformation tweets in the US, while anticipation was the predominant emotion in India. For India, the misinformation rate exhibited a lead relationship with vaccination, while in the US it lagged behind vaccination. Our study deciphered that emotions acted as differential carriers of misinformation across geography and time. These carriers can be monitored to develop strategic interventions for countering misinformation, leading to improved public health.

Domain Adaptable Self-supervised Representation Learning on Remote Sensing Satellite Imagery

This work presents a novel domain adaption paradigm for studying contrastive self-supervised representation learning and knowledge transfer using remote sensing satellite data. Major state-of-the-art remote sensing visual domain efforts primarily focus on fully supervised learning approaches that rely entirely on human annotations. On the other hand, human annotations in remote sensing satellite imagery are always subject to limited quantity due to high costs and domain expertise, making transfer learning a viable alternative. The proposed approach investigates the knowledge transfer of selfsupervised representations across the distinct source and target data distributions in depth in the remote sensing data domain. In this arrangement, self-supervised contrastive learning-based pretraining is performed on the source dataset, and downstream tasks are performed on the target datasets in a round-robin fashion. Experiments are conducted on three publicly available datasets, UC Merced Landuse (UCMD), SIRI-WHU, and MLRSNet, for different downstream classification tasks versus label efficiency. In self-supervised knowledge transfer, the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with label efficiency labels and outperforms a fully supervised setting. A more in-depth qualitative examination reveals consistent evidence for explainable representation learning. The source code and trained models are published on GitHub.

Functional Knowledge Transfer with Self-supervised Representation Learning

This work investigates the unexplored usability of self-supervised representation learning in the direction of functional knowledge transfer. In this work, functional knowledge transfer is achieved by joint optimization of self-supervised learning pseudo task and supervised learning task, improving supervised learning task performance. Recent progress in self-supervised learning uses a large volume of data, which becomes a constraint for its applications on small-scale datasets. This work shares a simple yet effective joint training framework that reinforces human-supervised task learning by learning self-supervised representations just-in-time and vice versa. Experiments on three public datasets from different visual domains, Intel Image, CIFAR, and APTOS, reveal a consistent track of performance improvements on classification tasks during joint optimization. Qualitative analysis also supports the robustness of learnt representations. Source code and trained models are available on GitHub.