Title of the talk: What Hides Behind Online Identity (or Anonymity)

Delivered by : Rada Mihalcea, University of Michigan, USA

Abstract: The cyberspace has brought us closer than we have ever been, giving us the ability to instantly communicate with anyone, anywhere. But this very ability has also brought unimagined threats: predators and other ill-intended people can easily hide behind digital identities, deceiving and misleading those with whom they communicate. In this talk, I will describe our work in building linguistic and multimodal algorithms for deception detection, targeting identity deception, fake news, trial videos, and also going after deception in multiple cultures. I will also show how these algorithms can provide insights into what makes a good lie - and thus teach us how we can spot a liar. As it turns out, computers can be trained to identify lies in many different contexts, and they can do it much better than humans do!

About the Speaker: Rada Mihalcea is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Michigan. Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, multilingual natural language processing, and computational social sciences. She serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, Research in Language in Computation, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She was a program co-chair for the Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2011) and the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (2009), and a general chair for the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2015). She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award (2008) and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2009). In 2013, she was made an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.