Brendan is an assistant professor at the School of Information and Communication Studies in UCD. Brendan has always had a strong interest in the factors that impact human judgement of information. From a disciplinary perspective, his work is at the intersection of HCI, Behavioural Science, Information Science and News and Journalism studies. Traditionally, his work has focused on bias and credibility, but more recently it has focused on misinformation and disinformation. Due to world events and the proliferation and threat of disinformation, much of his work is now undertaken within the security domain.

Brendan is currently the PI of a Horizon Europe Innovation Action project, called VIGILANT. It is a 3-year, €4m project with 18 partners that will equip European Police Authorities with advanced technologies from academia to detect and analyse disinformation campaigns that lead to criminal activities. Brendan completed his PhD in the ADAPT Centre in the School of Computer Science and Statistics in Trinity College Dublin under Professor Vincent Wade and the late Professor Séamus Lawless. His PhD investigated the impact of visual presentation of news on the perception of bias. After completing his PhD, he held three concurrent positions as a Postdoctoral researcher on the
H2020 Provenance project developing tools to detect disinformation, an IRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow on a two-year project focused on credibility and disinformation, and as a research fellow on the Proactive Experiences and Agency challenge in the Digitally Enhanced Engagement Strand (PEA@DEE), in the ADAPT Centre.

 

Recent publications:

Kocaballi, A. B., Sezgin, E., Clark, L., Carroll, J. M., Huang, Y., Huh-Yoo, J., Kim, J., Rafal Kocielnik, R., Lee, Y., Mamykina, L., Mitchell, E. G., Moore, R. J., Murali, P.,  Mynatt, E. D., Park, S., Pasta, A., Richards, D., Silva, L. M., Smriti, D., Spillane, B., Zhang, Z., Zubatiy, T. (2022). Design and evaluation of challenges of conversational agents in health care and well-being: selective review study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 24(11), e38525

Conlan, O., Suiter, J., Yousuf, B., Qureshi, M. A., Spillane, B., Munnelly, G., Carroll, O., Runswick, M., Park, K., Culloty, E. (2021). PROVENANCE: An Intermediary-Free Solution for Digital Content Verification. KDAH Workshop at 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management 

Spillane, B., Lawless, S., & Wade, V. (2020). The impact of increasing and decreasing the professionalism of news webpage aesthetics on the perception of bias in news articles. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference On Human-Computer Interaction (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)