IEEE UK and Ireland SSIT Webinar | 20 Years of Analysing Multilingual Propaganda Content on the Web by Prof Mark Last of Data Science Research Centre, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
This lecture is organised by Phoenix Computer Society Chapter and co-hosted by: UK and Ireland SSIT Chapter; Connecticut Section Jt Computer Society; SMC and SSIT Chapter; Northwest Florida Section Computer Society and Communications Chapter; Santa Clara Valley Section Computer Society Chapter; Lone Star Section Computer Society Chapter San Antonio; San Fernando Valley Section Jt. Computer Society and Communications Chapter; Orange County Section Computer Society Chapter; San Diego Section Computer Society Chapter; Hawaii Section Chapter, COM19/SP01/C16; IEEE New Jersey Coast Section SIGHT and New Jersey Coast Section Jt. IM and Computer Society Chapter.
Access to online Meeting
Registered participants will be provided with the link prior to the event.
Guest Lecture Focus
From its early years as a global information infrastructure, the Internet, originally designed by and for the US Department of Defence, has been efficiently and effectively misused by various hate groups who often consider the US government their worst enemy. For example, it turned out that WWW played a critical role in the preparation of the 9/11 attacks both as a source of inspirational information and as a safe means of covert communication between the plotters.
Shortly after the tragic events of 2001, our binational team of US and Israeli researchers started to explore the online activities of various hate groups. Initially, we developed a prototype of a monitoring system aimed at detecting the frequent visitors of terrorist websites, which may become influenced by terrorist propaganda and eventually develop into what we call today “the lone wolf attackers”. Shortly after, we focused on another, closely related question: what makes terrorist-generated propaganda content in various languages different from unbiased news reports discussing similar topics?
Over the years, we developed prototypes of several additional text analysis tools such as text summarization algorithms, which can automatically summarize large amounts of untranslated content in any language, as well as AI tools for automated detection of metaphoric language. After presenting the motivational and ethical foundations of our research, I plan to describe some of our methods and finally, discuss past and future challenges in this important and fascinating domain.
About the Speaker
Mark Last is a Full Professor at the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, the Founding Director of the Data Science Research Center at Ben-Gurion University, and the Head of the Data Engineering Program. Prof Last obtained his PhD from Tel Aviv University, Israel, in 2000.
Before starting his appointment at Ben-Gurion University in March 2001, Mark Last was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA (1999-2001). Between 2009-2012, Prof Last served as the Head of the Software Engineering Program.
Prof Last has published about 240 peer-reviewed papers, two monographs, and 11 edited volumes on data mining, text mining, and cyber security. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society and a Professional Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Prof. Last is an Action Editor of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery and an Editorial Board Member of Machine Learning Journal and ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. His main research interests include data stream mining, multi-lingual and cross-lingual text mining, cyber intelligence, image classification, and medical informatics.