Artificial Intelligence for Countering Disinformation and Information warfare

Scope and Topics of Interest

In recent years, online and multimedia content has overtaken traditional media as a preferred source of information. The advent of the Internet and social networks has favored the sharing of free information and freedom of expression. However, the uncontrolled access to these platforms has also turned them into a tool for dissemination of disinformation to deceive or harm others. This latter aspect, i.e. harmfulness, is often ignored, but it is extremely important in the context of information warfare where digital contents (text, image, video and speech) are employed. Harmful information about major events, from the Covid-19 outbreak to the 2020 US election, is jeopardizing public health and safety. Over the past few years the research in the public and private sectors has increased public awareness, improved detection tools, and raised the costs of engaging in disinformation.

Despite these results, there are several challenges that still need to be addressed. Firstly, artificial intelligence tools are not only used to counter disinformation, but they are accelerating the threat, for example by providing systems to generate fake news, images and videos. Secondly, once a detection system has been deployed, malicious actors can modify their behaviour or exploit adversarial attacks to avoid detection. Therefore it is necessary to devise detection systems that are robust to changes in the underlying distribution of the data. Finally, there is a general lack of solutions that effectively combine together multiple modalities (text, video, speech and network analysis), therefore providing more robust and accurate solutions.

This special session aims to collect a diverse set of articles about new developments and applications of machine learning and computational intelligence solutions for disinformation detection and diffusion inspection. We encourage submissions that focus on different communication channels and modalities, explainable methods and real-world applications.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• Image and Video Forensics: verification of images and videos, source identification

• New state of the art dataset for disinformation detection

• Multimodal approach to disinformation detection and information warfare

• Network analysis (bot detection and coordinate behaviours)

• Machine and Deep learning models for disinformation detection

• XAI and Fusion methods for disinformation detection

• Spreading of disinformation in Social Networks

• Success case studies

• Analysis and detection of propaganda

• Fake news, Rumor, Hoaxes detection

• Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing for disinformation detection and analysis

• Automatic detection of coordinated propaganda campaigns such as the use of social bots, botnets, seminar users, and Internet water armies

Important Dates

• Title and Abstract submission: January 31, 2022 (11:59 PM AoE). New submissions cannot be created past this deadline.

• Complete Paper (pdf) submission: February 14, 2022 (11:59 PM AoE) STRICT DEADLINE

• Notification of acceptance: April 26, 2022

• Final paper submission: May 23, 2022

More information https://wcci2022.org/dates/

Submissions

Please submit your manuscript through the conference main website by following the instructions provided in this link and by selecting "Artificial Intelligence for Countering Disinformation and Information warfare" as special session when submitting.

Organizing Committee

Irene Amerini, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

David Camacho, Technical University of Madrid, Spain

Mauro Conti, University of Padova, Italy

Giovanni Da San Martino, University of Padova, Italy

Alejandro Martín, Technical University of Madrid, Spain

Paolo Rosso, Universitat Politècnica de València , Spain

Arkaitz Zubiaga, Queen Mary University of London, UK