Artificial Intelligence for Countering Disinformation and Information Warfare

Scope and Topics of Interest

Information disorder encompasses various tactics that contaminate information streams, including the dissemination of fake news, hoaxes, hyperpartisan content, and rumors. This phenomenon can significantly sway public opinion on crucial subjects such as the economy, politics, and health. Notable instances, such as the Anti-vax movement, posing a threat to public health, and the QAnon conspiracy or Pizzagate events in Washington, underscore the detrimental societal impacts spurred by the spread of false information. After the CoVID-19 crisis prompted the World Health Organization to coin the term "infodemic" to describe the surge in fake news surrounding the pandemic. These incidents, along with others, have fueled a growing interest in comprehending and combating information disorder. This 2nd edition of the Artificial Intelligence for Countering Disinformation and Information warfare (https://sites.google.com/diag.uniroma1.it/ai4cdiw/) aims to appeal to a diverse audience of researchers within the computational intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning communities, particularly those focused on disinformation detection and information warfare analysis. The special session addresses the need for a collaborative effort across various fields, including natural language processing, image processing, network analysis—bot detection, coordinate behavior—, multimedia forensics, and semantic forensics. By fostering a multidisciplinary approach, this special session strives to unite researchers from different domains and encourage innovative strategies to tackle the challenges posed by information disorder.

The contributions received are expected to provide the research community with a plethora of applications and novel solutions based on Deep Learning (including recent architectures such as Transformer), Natural Language Processing techniques, Evolutionary Computation or Social Network Analysis, among others. Additionally, this session also seeks solutions facing new challenges such as multilingualism, explainability, efficiency and advanced human language understanding models.

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 datasets 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.

• 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.

• Oppositional thinking analysis: Conspiracy theories vs critical thinking

Important Dates

• 15 January 2024. Paper Submission Deadline. Strict deadline.

• 15 March 2024. Paper Acceptance Notification.

• 1 May 2024. Final Paper Submission & Early Registration Deadline.

More information at https://2024.ieeewcci.org/authors/important-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

• David Camacho, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

• Alejandro Martín, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

• Paolo Rosso, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

• Irene Amerini, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy