There has been a significant body of work that explores “misinformation” or “disinformation” in the media. Research has explored how to identify misinformation, and how it spreads or goes viral. However, detection is increasingly hard, because of the genAI tools that can be used to craft tailored misinformation. When detected, individual pieces of misinformation can be debunked. However, there is evidence that state actors (and others) are starting to launch more sophisticated information operations that try to craft a narrative that will shape public opinion. This involves combining factual information/hard news with opinions and potentially small elements of tailored disinformation generated using AI to persuade people, particularly in open societies typically found in democracies. While such influence building operations have been a tradition in statecraft, the ability to generate information really fast using AI, spread it fast provided by social media, and the removal of gatekeepers from the more traditional media sources, have provided a new potency to this approach. In this talk, we’ll talk about disinformation, how easy it is to generate plausible “facts” in the era or Large Language models, and narrative constructions. We’ll also describe our recent work (with former PhD student Priyanka Ranade) in creating computational approaches that might detect when a narrative is being constructed.

About The Presenter

Anupam Joshi is the Oros Family Professor and Acting Dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).  He also serves as the Director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity.  He was previously the Chair of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department, and is an Adjunct Professor at IIT Delhi’s School of IT.  He is a Fellow of IEEE. He has published over 300 technical papers with an h-index of 95 and over 33000 citations (per Google scholar), been granted nine patents, and has obtained research support over $22M from National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), US Dept of Defense (DoD), NIST, IBM, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin amongst others.

Dr. Joshi obtained a B.Tech degree from IIT Delhi in 1989, and a Masters and Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1991 and 1993 respectively. His research interests are at the intersection of AI and Systems. He did some of the earliest work in data management and security for mobile and ad-hoc networks using AI approaches, which was cited in his selection as a Fellow of IEEE. Over the last decade, he has been exploring this intersection to improve Cybersecurity — using Distributed AI approaches for attack detection and resilience in CPS/IoT systems, and policy driven approaches to security and privacy. This work that has led not just to papers but technology transfer to small Maryland companies. He has also applied AI approaches to various facets of medicine. He has worked with scholars from areas as diverse as medicine, psychology, linguistics, gerontology, and public policy to explore AI based approaches in those domains that has led to publications and extramural funding. This collaboration is recognized by his appointment as affiliate faculty in the School of Medicine at UM Baltimore and in UMBC’s School of Aging.  He has active international collaborations with colleagues in Japan, India and Europe. As Chair and Dean, Dr. Joshi has worked to create innovative programs (Data Science, AI, Minor in Computing for non STEM majors) at UMBC, and overseen growth and increased diversity in the student body and faculty, and worked with external stakeholders and the legislature to raise support for the growth of Engineering and Computing at UMBC.