UMBC PhD student Ommo Clark wins best paper award with Karuna Joshi

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 18:20:20 -0400
ai, knowledge-graph, misinformation, nlp

A research paper by UMBC Information Systems PhD student Ommo Clark co-authored with her advisor Professor Karuna Joshi received the Best Student Paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Digital Health held earlier this month in Helsinki as part of the IEEE Services Congress.

The paper addressed the problem of identifying health misinformation on social media platforms, which poses a threat to public health by contributing to hesitancy in vaccines, delayed medical interventions, and the adoption of untested or harmful treatments.

Clark and Joshi evaluated their hybrid approach to combining LLM and knowledge-graph technologies on a dataset of Reddit posts discussing chronic health conditions, and showed the benefits compared to models that only use text or knowledge-graphs. Their paper, Real-Time Detection of Online Health Misinformation using an Integrated KnowledgeGraph-LLM Approach, is available here.