Event Details

THIS TALK WILL NOT BE RECORDED FOR PUBLIC POSTING ON ISI’s YOUTUBE CHANNEL.

The proliferation of online platforms and social media has led to a surge in deceptive activities and influence campaigns, which pose significant harm to our society, in general, and vulnerable users, in particular. In this talk, I will present a research agenda for identifying, investigating, and mitigating online harms in socio-technical systems. I will start by describing my research to design AI- and network-based approaches for the detection of inauthentic, coordinated behaviors on social media. Through these approaches, I will characterize strategies used in information operations, explore factors that contribute to users’ susceptibility to influence, and provide actionable insights that can inform social media providers and policymakers to formulate strategies for taming harm and supporting vulnerable users. Finally, I will discuss the challenges and strategies to improve the resilience of the information ecosystem, including the ethical and legal considerations for social media regulation and the potential for interdisciplinary collaborations to address these complex issues.

Speaker Bio

Luca Luceri is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California (USC). His research agenda focuses on detecting and mitigating online harms in socio-technical systems. He investigates deceptive and malicious behaviors on social media, with a particular emphasis on problems such as social media manipulation, information operations, and coordinated influence campaigns. As a Postdoc at ISI, he is the technical leader of the DARPA-funded program INCAS and co-PI of a Swiss NSF-sponsored project called CARISMA. Prior to joining ISI, he was a Research Scientist and the head of the Network Science research unit at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI). During his Ph.D., obtained from the University of Bern (Switzerland) in 2020, he spent 8 months at ISI as a visiting graduate student working in the context of the DARPA-funded SocialSim program. His research incorporates machine learning, data science, and network science and falls within the fields of computational social science, AI for social good, and behavioral science.

Register in advance for this webinar: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__0VhakI6Q6i3JsasdmNWcA

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Host/Hiring Mgr: Emilio Ferrara, POC: Pete Zamar