News
The Inside Scoop on Watermarking and Content Authentication
UMD’s Soheil Feizi weighs in on the unreliability of existing watermarking technologies in MIT Technology Review.
Does Banning Extremists Online Work? It Depends.
GW’s Rebekah Tromble tells Vox that the broad reach of far-right extremist groups, such as QAnon, Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, has diminished since they banned from mainstream social media apps.
Israel-Hamas War Misinformation on Social Media is Harder to Track, Researchers Say
GW’s Rebekah Tromble tells NBC News that a pullback in content moderation on social media has helped propaganda about the Israel-Hamas conflict spread.
Tracking Emotions on Social Media to Predict Which Posts Go Viral
UMD’s Cody Buntain is the co-author of a study that strives to understand the emotion theories that play into social media sharing.
Chop & Learn: Teaching Computers to Recognize Food in All Forms
UMD’s Abhinav Shrivastava is teaching AI systems how to recognize objects as they transform into different shapes, such as fruits being sliced.
Researchers Tested AI Watermarks—and Broke All of Them
UMD’s Soheil Feizi and Tom Goldstein are publishing studies detailing how easy it is to evade current methods of watermarking—and even add fake watermarks to real images.
Grant Funds Bilingual Capabilities of Health Chatbot for Moms of Babies
UMD’s Jordan Boyd-Graber is helping to develop a chatbot in that will help new moms answer questions—in both English and Spanish—related to infant and maternal health, pulling information from reputable online sources like the CDC.
Fact Checkers Take Stock of Their Efforts: ‘It’s Not Getting Better’
GW’s David Broniatowski is featured in a New York Times article that addresses the difficulties organizations that aim to combat online misinformation face.
New Research Reveals Weakness In Facebook’s Fake News Policies
A study led by GW’s David Broniatowski and Lorien Abroms found that that Facebook failed to stop the spread of misinformation on COVID-19 because their efforts were "undermined" by the core design features of the platform itself.
Behavioral Sciences Technology Expert Pablo Paredes Joins UMIACS
UMD’s Pablo Paredes Castro studies the relationship between technology and health, and how digital and physical tools can sustain and improve our well-being.
Study Finds the Design of Facebook Allowed Covid-19 Vaccine Misinformation to Spread Despite Removals
Research led by GW’s David Broniatowski found that even if Facebook removed troublesome content in one place, users could find it easily elsewhere on the platform. He hopes his group’s research will help platforms develop new approaches to deal with misinformation.
Researcher Heading New $20M NSF-Backed Institute Says Systems Should Support Societal Good
UMD’s Hal Daume discusses the current state of AI and the role that TRAILS will play moving forward.
Digital Skills ‘Break Through’ Across Disciplines
UMD’s Kate Atchison leads the Break Through Tech Summer Guild program, designed to give students from other majors who are underrepresented a hands-on opportunity in tech.
Brauneis Leads Development of Database to Inform Users on Litigation Relating to AI
GW’s Robert Brauneis is developing a database to make it easier for others to understand AI litigation.
AI Firms Under Fire for Allegedly Infringing on Copyrights
GW’s Robert Brauneis shares his thoughts with Voice of America on how U.S. copyright law applies to images and content generated by AI.
Researchers Develop and Test AI Text-Detector Tools
UMD’s Soheil Feizi, Tom Goldstein and Furong Huang are publishing groundbreaking research on the reliability of AI text-detectors.
Buntain Builds Digital Tools to Combat Misinformation
UMD’s Cody Buntain works to make the online information ecosystem a more informative, higher-quality space by enhancing its resistance to manipulation.
Images Posted on Internet are Training AI Algorithms
GW’s Robert Pless describes how that billions of photos posted on the internet are training algorithms for generating images made with artificial intelligence.
Disinformation Researchers Under Investigation: What’s Happening and Why
GW’s Rebekah Tromble tells Nature that scientists have been targeted by legal actions and information requests from conservative activists and leaders before—and it’s not likely to stop anytime soon.
Tech Maturation Awards Bring Potentially Transformative GW Inventions Closer to Market
GW’s Ekundayo Shittu received a Technology Maturation Award for his novel system that utilizes non-intrusive load monitoring, machine learning, edge computing, and reliability analysis techniques to comprehensively evaluate medical equipment utilization and condition in hospitals.