About AIEM

The mission of the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Media (AIEM) research group at Boston University is to conduct research and foster education in areas related to artificial intelligence and emerging media. We explore and create techniques from machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision to interpret emerging media, their role in mass and interpersonal communication, and understand the human and automated processes by which emerging media are developed, marketed, shaped and reshaped by users.

BU AIEM is housed in the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering and is part of BU’s Artificial Intelligence (AIR) Initiative. Our team members are affiliated with various colleges and departments throughout Boston University, including the College of Arts and Sciences (Department of Computer Science), the College of Communication (Division of Emerging Media), and the College of Engineering (Department of Computer Engineering).

BU AIEM started with a Hariri Institute incubator research award in June 2016 led by Lei Guo. Projects with Prakash Ishwar, Margrit Betke, and collaborators led to first publications on Big Social Data Analytics in Journalism and Mass Communication and Dynamic Allocation of Crowd Contributions for Sentiment Analysis during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, respectively.

In mid 2018, BU AIEM has proudly graduated its first Ph.D. student, Mehrnoosh Sameki, celebrated a Google Research Award in the “Information Retrieval and Real Time Content” category, and welcomed a new faculty team member, Derry Wijaya. In the same year, the collaboration among AIEM faculty and students led to $1 million NSF grant to address emerging media representation and effects.

BU AIEM is currently working on a project to examine international news coverage of COVID-19 and its impact. We meet every week via ZOOM.