CRCS Lunch Seminar

Date: Monday, October 17, 2011
Time: 12:15pm – 1:45pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speaker: P. Takis Metaxas, Harvard CRCS and CS, Wellesley

Title: Recognizing Network Manipulation: A short history and current challenges

Abstract:
We live in an increasingly interconnected world, one in which people turn to the Web and online social networks for information when making important medical, financial and political decisions. As more and more people use sites, such as Google, Bing, Facebook and Twitter, on a daily basis as a primary source for locating information, interested groups and individuals try to trick them in promoting misinformation by using “spamming” techniques.

In this talk we will give a short history of Web spam and how search engines and online social networks have tried to cope with it over the years. We will describe the ways in which Web spam is related to social propaganda and we will present socially-inspired algorithms that are able to reveal spammers. Several examples of successful uncovering of misinformation that emerged during the recent elections will also be presented.

As a way of making the presentation more personal, please consider completing the following anonymous questionnaire before the talk: http://bit.ly/qNcCy6

Bio: Panagiotis Takis Metaxas is a Professor of Computer Science and Founder of the Media Arts and Sciences Program at Wellesley College. His research interests are currently in Social Computing, Web Spam and Cognitive Hacking. His current research projects involve studying the predictive power of Social Network Data, especially related to prediction of political events, such as elections, and in designing a social networking tool that will support user privacy while evaluating the trustworthiness of the information the user receives.