NEW YORK â Using machine learning, a team of U.S. researchers led by Indian American computer scientist Anshumali Shrivastava at Rice University has discovered an efficient way for social media companies to keep misinformation from spreading online. Their method applies machine learning in a smarter way to improve the performance of Bloom filters, a widely used technique devised a half-century ago. Using test databases of fake news stories and computer viruses, Shrivastava and statistics graduate student Zhenwei Dai showed their Adaptive Learned Bloom Filter required 50 percent less memory to achieve the same level of performance as learned Bloom filters. To explain their filtering approach, Shrivastava and Dai cited some data from Twitter.