Meeyoung Cha appointed APL Professor
Meeyoung Cha, Scientific Director at Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) and head of the research group „Data Science for Humanity“, has been appointed Adjunct Professor (“außerplanmäßige Professorin” = APL) of the Faculty of Computer Science by the Rector of Ruhr University Bochum.
As part of the research area “Usability” of the CASA cluster of excellence, Prof. Cha focusses on the interface between technology and humanity. Since December 2023 her research group at MPI-SP is working on understanding social information and human-machine interactions and developing human-centred approaches within Data Science and Computational Social Science. Their goal is to examine patterns of socially meaningful information (like media bias, fake news, conventions in social media etc.), to design fair, accountable and explainable AI and to find ways of using computational methods to face global challenges in domains of safety, trust and well-being.
Meeyoung Cha’s most noted research concerns topics such as misinformation, fraud detection, long-tail content and poverty mapping. In addition to several best paper awards, she has received two Test-of-Time Awards (ACM IMC 2022, AAAI ICWSM 2020) as well as the Hong Jin-Ki Creator Award (2024) and the Korean Young Information Scientist Award (2019). She has also been appointed “Distinguished Member” by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for her relevant contributions to research in Computational Social Science.
In addition to her position as MPI-SP, Zusätzlich zu ihrer Position am MPI-SP, Meeyoung Cha holds a joint position as a Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), where she has received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2008. Before she found her way to Bochum, she was a Chief Investigator at the Korean Institute for Basic Science and a Visiting Professor with Facebook/Meta.