During Arizona Tech Week 2026 I joined a live session at NewsGenie's offices in Mesa, Arizona titled "Solving for bias in media and online hate speech." The conversation focused on how research teams, platforms, and media outlets can tackle two deeply connected phenomena: media bias and online hate speech.
I shared the stage with Flor Miriam Plaza del Arco, an expert on online hate speech, and together we covered the question from complementary angles: why annotator disagreement is signal rather than noise, which taxonomies are actually holding up against multilingual and multicultural reality, and which evaluation methodologies let us distinguish models that detect real patterns from models that just memorize shortcuts.
The meeting was made possible by NewsGenie, who opened their offices as a discussion space within the Arizona Tech Week program, and by the organizing team who pulled in a wonderfully mixed audience of research, industry, and journalism.