[AI Seminar Series] Seminar by Prof. Emilio Ferrara, Friday Oct.10th, 12-1pm, MRB Seminar Room

[Vassilis Tsotras]

The next AI Seminar will be next Friday October 10th, 12:00-1:00pm at the
MRB Seminar Room (1st floor).

*** Pizza and refreshments will be provided ****

To keep track of the number of attendees, please *register* at:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-seminar-series-tickets-1772867116269

The talk will be given by *Prof. Emilio Ferrara*, Department of Computer
Science, USC

TITLE: AI & Social Manipulation

ABSTRACT:
In this talk, I will overview my decadelong journey into understanding the
implications of online platform manipulation. I'll start from detecting
malicious bots and other forms of manipulation including troll accounts,
coordinated campaigns, and disinformation operations. The impact of my work
will be corroborated with examples of findings enabled by our technology,
e.g., our unveiling of the "Russian bots" operation prior to the 2016 U.S.
Presidential election, which informed official Senate investigations and
new regulations. I will then illustrate similar issues with the 2020, 2022
and 2024 U.S. Election, as well as COVID-related conspiracies and public
health misinformation. I'll conclude by discussing the ML tools we
developed to model online mis/disinformation, reveal the malicious
adversaries behind the curtains, and characterize their activity, behavior,
and strategies, suggesting how they are changing the way researchers and
study online platforms in the era of automation and artificial intelligence.

Bio:
Emilio Ferrara is a professor of Computer Science at the Thomas Lord
Department of Computer Science at the School of Advanced Computing of USC,
professor (by courtesy) of Communication at USC Annenberg and of Preventive
Medicine at the Keck School, and co-director of the Machine Intelligence
and Data Science (MINDS) group at USC ISI. He also serves as associate
department chair and director of the Computer Science PhD program at USC.
His research focus has been at the intersection between developing theory
and methods in network science, machine learning and NLP, and applying them
to study socio-technical systems and networks. He is concerned with
understanding the implications of AI and networks on human behavior, and
their effects on society at large. Ferrara has published 250+ articles that
have appeared on venues like the Proceeding of the National Academy of
Sciences, Communications of the ACM, Physical Review Letters, and the top
ACM, IEEE and AAAI conferences and journals. As a PI at USC, he has
received $20M+ in research funding from DARPA, IARPA, NSF, NIH, AFOSR and
ONR. Ferrara received accolades including the 2016 DARPA Young Faculty
Award and DARPA Director’s Fellowship, the 2016 Complex Systems Society
Junior Scientific Award, the 2019 USC Viterbi Research Award and the 2022
Research.com Rising Stars award.

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Sponsored by the RAISE at UCR Institute, the AI Seminar Series presents
speakers working on cutting edge Foundational AI or applying AI in their
research. The goal of these seminars is to inform the UCR community about
current trends in AI research and promote collaborations between faculty in
this emerging field. These seminars are open to interested faculty and
graduate/undergraduate students. Please forward this email to other
colleagues or students in your lab that may be interested. After the seminar a
discussion will follow for questions, open problems, ideas for possible
collaborations etc.

Sincerely,
Vassilis Tsotras
Professor, CSE Department
co-Director, RAISE at UCR Institute

Amit Roy-Chowdhury
Professor, ECE Department
co-Director, RAISE at UCR Institute
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