Ben Horne
Assistant Professor
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Benjamin D. Horne is the CCI Board of Visitors assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is also a Joint Faculty Assistant Professor in The Bredesen Center’s Data Science and Engineering program at The University of Tennessee Knoxville, a founding fellow of the CCI Information Integrity Institute, and an Affiliate of the Center for National Security and Foreign Affairs within the Baker School for Public Policy and Public Affairs. He received his PhD. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where he received the Robert McNaughton Prize for outstanding graduate in Computer Science. He received both a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Business Administration from Union University in Jackson, Tennessee.
Horne is a highly interdisciplinary, computational social scientist whose research focuses on the production of, consumption of, and interventions to disinformation and malign influence in media ecosystems. Broadly, this research includes analyzing disinformation in media and designing information interventions for said disinformation. His work has been published in conference venues such as the International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) and the ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci), and in journals such as Behaviour & Information Technology, Computers in Human Behavior, and Communications of the ACM.
Additionally, Horne’s work has been covered in the news media by organizations such as Reuters, Business Insider, Mashable, IEEE Spectrum, and Yleisradio Oy in Finland. He is co-PI on research funded by the Minerva Research Initiative and the Minerva Defense Education and Civilian University Research Partnership from the Office of Naval Research.
Education
- Computer science, PhD. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- Computer science, BS, Union University
- Business administration, BS, Union University
Research Interests
- Disinformation/misinformation
- Computational social science
- Content moderation/platform governance
- Alt-tech platforms
- Media ecosystems
- Media trust and influence