The Center for Information Integrity at the University at Buffalo is rooted in the shared conviction that accurate information is required for vigorous public debate within a democracy.

CII is devoted to the identification, amelioration, and combatting of unreliable information that pollutes the public sphere.  Our members take on this existential threat from multidisciplinary approaches derived from fields as varied as history, literature, art, media study, information science, psychology, computer engineering, political science, geography, communication, law, and biomedical sciences.

World-Class Researchers from 40+ Disciplines Seeking Socio-Technological Solutions to Combat Unreliable and Misleading Information

CII brings together renowned faculty from across the university to identify, evaluate, and mitigate the impact of unreliable information in key areas of public life including public health (e.g., vaccine hesitancy) climate change, and the integrity of democratic processes.

  • Laurene Tumiel-Berhalter
    11/20/23
    Laurene Tumiel Berhalter, Associate Professor, Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, is Director of Community Translational Research. An epidemiologist by training, she has over 25 years’ experience conducting community-based participatory research and health disparities research to improve chronic disease self-management and cancer prevention among underserved communities.
  • Hongxin Hu
    11/20/23
    Hongxin Hu, Associate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering. researches security and privacy, networking and machine learning. His research has been funded by NSF, USDOT, Google, VMware, Amazon, Dell and more. He has published over 100 refereed technical papers, many of which appeared in top tier journals and presented at scientific conferences.
  • Heather Abraham
    11/20/23
    Heather Abraham, Visiting Associate Professor , School of Law , is Director of the UB Civil Rights & Transparency Clinic, a litigation clinic dedicated to enforcing and advancing civil rights and government accountability, with a particular emphasis on fair housing, open government, and freedom of the press.
  • Shambhu Upadhyaya
    11/20/23
    Shambhu Upadhyaya, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, and Director of the Center of Excellence in Information Systems Assurance Research and Education. His research focuses on protecting the United States’ infrastructure from cyber threats. That includes electric power grids, transportation systems, financial networks, military assets and water supplies.
  • Dalia Antionia Caraballo Muller
    11/20/23
    Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller, Associate Professor, Latin American and Caribbean History, is a bilingual, multi-cultural, multi-racial researcher and educator. Her twin passions are the study of the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the study of transformative learning models in higher education.
  • Jeff Good
    11/20/23
    Jeff Good, Professor, and Chair of the Department of Linguistics, researches how language choice influences the way a message is received and whether its source is viewed as trustworthy. He is an active member of the UB Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science.
  • Heidi Julien
    11/20/23
    Heidi Julien, Professor, Information Science, focuses her research on digital literacy and information behavior. Her work seeks to understand how best to deliver digital literacy education to the public, including how to prepare and support digital literacy instructors, including librarians.
  • Mark Shepard
    11/20/23
    Mark Shepard, Associate Professor, Architecture and Media Study , is an artist, architect and researcher whose work addresses contemporary entanglements. His recent book, There Are No Facts: Attentive algorithms, extractive data practices and the quantification of everyday life (MIT Press), examines the uncommon ground we share in a post-truth world.