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

[Vassilis Tsotras]

A reminder for our AI seminar tomorrow; please register below if you plan
to attend.

V. Tsotras

---------------------------------------------

On Sat, Oct 4, 2025 at 9:18 PM Vassilis Tsotras <vassilis.tsotras at ucr.edu>
wrote:

> 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.
>
> ------------------------------------
> 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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