Dr. Amira Ghenai is an Assistant Professor at Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management at Toronto Metropolitan University and an adjunct assistant professor at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Prior to this, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Information Studies and a member of the Accessible Computing Technologies Research Group (ACT Lab) at McGill University.

Amira completed her PhD of Computer Science at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. She also received a Masters of Computing Sciences in Software Engineering from the University of Imperial College London. Her research interests include information retrieval, social media analysis, machine learning, misinformation, and accessibility for older adults. More specifically, she is interested in the research question of how search and social media interactions affect the human behavior in health-related decision-making process. Funded by AGEWELL - Canada's technology and aging network, she also worked on addressing the accessibility barriers faced by older adults when exploring the online health-related content.

Amira has well-established research track record with notable conference publications (such as ACM CSCW, ACM CHIIR, and ACM ICTIR). She further served as program committee member and reviewer for top-tier conferences and journals (such as JMIR, ACM CSCW, AAAI ICWSM,and ACM WWW).

News and Highlights

  • 2021.02.24: Our paper titled "E-Health for Older Adults: Navigating Misinformation" has been accepted to be published in the 7th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health (ICT4AWE).
  • 2021.01.04: Started a sessional teaching position for the "Introduction to Computer Programming" course at the department of Management Sciences, Faculty of Engineering, University of Waterloo.
  • 2020.12.29: Serving as the Accessibility Chair for the 15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2021).
  • 2020.12.18: Serving as a reviewer for the Big Data & Society, SAGE Journal.
  • 2020.11.20: Presented a guest lecture in the GLIS 626 - Usability Analysis & Assessment course at McGill School of Information Studies titled: "Think aloud method for system usability analysis". The lecture is available here.
  • 2020.11.12: Our paper titled "Addressing Misinformation in Online Social Networks: Diverse Platforms and the Potential of Multiagent Trust Modeling" has been accepted to be published in the Information journal - Special issues: Tackling Misinformation Online.
  • 2020.10.05: Serving on the Program Committee for the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR).
  • 2020.09.10: Serving as a reviewer for the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR).
  • 2020.08.13: My talk during the online ACM SIGIR CHIIR Conference about "A Think-Aloud Study about Medical Misinformation in Search Results" is now available online here.
  • 2020.08.10: Received the prestigious AGE-WELL Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Award in Technology and Aging [acceptance rate: 15%].
  • 2020.08.09: Serving as a reviewer for the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR).
  • 2020.08.05: Serving on the Program Committee for the WebConf 2021 (WWW) - User Modeling, Personalization and Inclusion Research Track.
  • 2020.03.02: Presenting a talk about "Designing systems to better address the problem of misinformation" at the Women in Data Science Conference 2020 WiDS@Ottawa.
  • 2020.02.18: Presenting a talk about: "A Think-Aloud Study to Understand Factors Affecting Online Health Search" at the School of Information Studies, McGill University.
  • 2019.12.15: Our paper: A Think-Aloud Study about Medical Misinformation in Search Results has been accepted to be presented in the ACM SIGIR CHIIR Conference , 14–18 March, 2020. Vancouver, Canada.
  • 2019.11.01: Successfully defended my PhD thesis under the title "Health Misinformation in Search and Social Media".
  • 2019.06.06: Our workshop paper: A Think-Aloud Study about Medical Misinformation in Search Results has been accepted to be presented in the Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation Exposure - ROME 2019 Colocated with ACM SIGIR 2019 conference, July 25, 2019. Paris, France.
  • 2019.01.17: Serving as a reviewer for the ACM Digital Health'19, to be held on April 20-23, 2019 in Marseille, France.
  • 2018.10.22: Presented a guest lecture in the CS886 Topics in AI: Trust and Online Social Networks course taught by Dr. Robin Cohen in Waterloo University.
  • 2018.08.09: Our paper Fake Cures: User-centric Modeling of Health Misinformation in Social Media has been accepted to be presented in the ACM CSCW'18 conference, November 3rd-7th, 2018 New York City's Hudson River (Jersey City).
  • 2018.04.07: Our research about health misinformation in search engines has been picked up and published in CBC NEWS. Check out the full article here.
  • 2018.04.05: Global News - Edmonton interviewed me about the recent research my colleagues conducted on health misinformation in search results. Check out the broadcast here.
  • 2018.03.28: "Cheriton School of Computer Science" published an article about the work my colleagues and I conducted on health misinformation in search results.
  • 2018.02.01: Started an exciting internship opportunity as a data scientist @ Thomson Reuters Labs, Waterloo. Canada
    • .
  • 2018.01.01: Serving as a review for the ACM Digital Health'18 to be held on April 23-26, 2018 in Lyon, France.
  • 2017.12.06: Presented my PhD research during a research collaboration meeting between Google, Inc. (Mountain View, CA, USA) & the University of Waterloo.
  • 2017.11.24: Successfully passed the Cheriton School of Computer Science Comprehensive Examination II. Now, I am officially a PhD candidate!
  • 2017.08.09: Serving as a reviewer for the "Journalism, Misinformation and Fact Checking" alternate track at the 27th World Wide Web Conference (WWW), to be held on April 23-27, 2018 in Lyon, France
  • 2017.06.27: Our paper Catching Zika Fever: Application of Crowdsourcing and Machine Learning for Tracking Health Misinformation on Twitter has been accepted to be presented in the IEEE ICHI'17 conference, 23-26 August 2017. Utah, USA
  • 2017.06.09: Our paper The Positive and Negative Influence of Search Results on People's Decisions about the Efficacy of Medical Treatments has been accepted to be presented in the ACM ICTIR'17 conference, 1-4 October 2017. Amsterdam.
  • 2017.04.11: My Doctoral Consortium about Health misinformation in search and social media has been accepted to be presented in the SIGIR'17 conference, 7-11 August. Tokyo. Japan
  • 2017.04.06: My PhD track paper has been accepted to be published in the ACM Digital Health'17 conference, 2-5 July. London. UK
  • 2017.03.22: Completed the requirements for the Fundamentals of University Teaching Certificate.
  • 2017.03.16: Selected to participate in the Summer School Series on Methods for Computational Social Science. Sardinia, Italy. [Acceptance rate: 32%]
  • 2017.03.01: Serving as a reviewer for the ACM Digital Health'17.