Member News

Prof. Nieheisel quote about early voting.
NEH to fund John Fiege's environmental film project, "The Valley of Ashes".
DeepFake-o-Meter Democratizes Deepfake Detection.
AI generated photo of President Macron and leader of Iran.
Mark Frank talk on Oct 11 at WCFEE conference.
Melissa McCarron Receives $83K Grant to create AI tool to increase integrity of medical information for those with limited English proficiency.
UB's Generative AI Task Force informed by CII Perspectives.

Unreliable Information in the News

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Image of a flaming radial tire.

New Work by Matt Kenyon reflects on misinformation around climate change through the medium of talking fire.

Recent Election Incident Highlights need for tools that counter Deepfakes.

Dr. Blanton presented A Bigger Picture of Secure Multi-Party Computation for the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) Speaker Series.

Image of a diagram from Dr. Blanton's presentation,.

Yotam Ophir, a lecturer on disinformation at the University of Buffalo, told the BBC the "vermin" rhetoric specifically echoed propaganda films produced by the Nazis, which compared Jewish people to rats and insects.

"While I agree it's politically charged to compare someone to Hitler or Nazi Germany," Mr Ophir said, "I think we should be able to say that calling the whole left side of the political map 'vermin' and a danger to our country is more alarming than saying those claims are reminding us of dark times from the past."

From the war in Ukraine to the price of eggs, the media wants to talk to Yotam Ophir about how misinformation spreads. Photo of Yotam Ophir. Logos for Time, Associated Press, Newsweek, The Guardian, NBC News, Insider, and Grid.
Photo of hands holding a phone showing a video of President Zelenskyy. Text reading: Deepfake detector spots fake videos of Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy New Scientist quoted Siwei Lyu about new Deepfake detection technique: “Up to this point, we have not seen a single example of deepfake generation algorithms that can create realistic human hands and demonstrate the flexibility and gestures of a real human being,” says Lyu. A deepfake detector designed to identify unique facial expressions and hand gestures could spot manipulated videos of world leaders such as Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin.
James A. Gardner's new book examines state of world’s democracies.
Elected officials receive anti-gun letters on ‘Alternative Rule’ paper Photos of Alternative Rule paper and Matt Kenyon.
NSF awards $1 million grant to UB team led by CII members to help prepare for next pandemic. Photos of Jennifer Surtees, E. Bruce Pitman, and Laurene Tumiel-Berthaler “It won’t matter how good our early-warning system is if when we do issue warnings, the community doesn’t respond” ¬–Jennifer Surtees, Lead PI.
November 2022 from MIT Press. There are no facts: Attentive algorighms, extractive data practics, and the quantifiation of everyday life. Photo of Mark Shepard.
Heidi Julien quoted in NBC story about how media handled story of 10yo and abortion.
Jessie Poon, UB Dept. of Geography, has a new book with collaborators Monica Stephens and Gordon K.S. Tan, Misinformation in the Digital Age: An American Infodemic. Photo of Jessie Poon.
Photo of Siwei Lyu. Text reading: Siwei Lyu named ACM Distinguished Member for Outstanding Scientific Contributions to Computing.
Logo of the History of Literature podcast. What Would Cervantes Do? (with David Castillo and William Egginton) The History of Literature podcast In this episode, Jacke talks to Professor David Castillo and Professor William Egginton about using the example of Cervantes to better understand the role that the humanities can play in dissecting and combatting the forces of disinformation. Photo of David Castillo.
Photo of Jeff Good. Jeff Good and collaborators publish in Bulletin of the World Health Organization Seek to raise awareness about how language choice influences the reception of public health messages in minority language communities “Trusting a message depends upon more than translating a message.”.
Photo of Siwei Lyu Deepfake videos are showing up everywhere and Siwei Lyu is the go-to expert on the subject Logos of Bloomberg News, USA Today, and the Daily Mail.
Photo of Yotam Ophir Yotam Ophir was interviewed for an article by Spectrum News 1 (6/16/22), White supremacism: How it's spread and the threat it poses.
Siwei Lyu elected Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and was elevated to Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2022 for contributions in digital media and media forensics Logos of IAPR and IEEE.
Logo of SaTC (Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Lyu received a 4-year $500,000 SaTC: CORE award from the NSF to explore ways to combat DeepFakes rather than simply detecting them.
New books by David Castillo Photos of book covers and author David Castillo Un-Deceptions: Cervantine Strategies for the Disinformation Age. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 2021. What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022 (with William Egginton).
Combating Disinformation in an Age of Information Overload A Webinar Led by Deans K. Lewis and R. Schulze featuring Co-directors David Castillo and Siwei Lyu talking about the Center for Information Integrity.