Member News

NEH to fund John Fiege's environmental film project, "The Valley of Ashes".
DeepFake-o-Meter Democratizes Deepfake Detection.
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.

“The deterioration of the information environment in our age of inflationary media has precipitated a crisis of reality: any sort of baseline for what we take to be “facts” no longer exists.…In this context, reality itself has become a consumer good, a product to be bought and sold in the marketplace.” Humanities to the Rescue: A Militant Editorial Project, CII Co-Director David Castillo.
The Promise and Peril of AI E. Bruce Pitman, Interim Vice-President & Chief Information Officer Evviva Weinraub Lajoie, Vice Provost University Libraries David Castillo, Professpr Dept. of Romance Languages & Literatures June 19, 2024, 7:00 PM 495 Skinnersville Rd. FREE and Open to the Public.
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,.
AARP Logo with headline, AI Gives Scammers a scary new tool. Siwei Lyu interviewed for May 2023 issue of AARP magazine about use of AI to scam older adults by impersonating grandchildren's voices.
UB Center for Information Integrity discusses bias in artificial intelligence at panel. Photos of panelists.
BBC Logo.

A BBC News report that President Biden accused Donald Trump of using rhetoric echoing that heard in Nazi Germany quoted CII's Yotam Ophir.

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."

Scripps News quoted Siwei Lyu on the use of AI-generated influencers in disinformation campaigns and prowing concern among experts. "Banning the technology may not be as helpful as we may think, because the technology has beneficial uses.
Photo of James Gardner. Bloomberg interviewed CII’s James Gardner for an article about how the Republican party might handle the scandal surrounding newly elected congressman George Santos, who has admitted to major fabrications on his resume. Gardner said Santos could face legal trouble if he lied on federal campaign paperwork. Santos could also face ethics trouble in Congress, “Expulsion is a political mechanism, but on the other hand it's meant to be a vehicle for enforcing ethical standards," Gardner said. "So what will be the politics of it if Republicans have an extremely narrow majority and this guy is a part of that narrow majority?” Bloomberg logo.
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.
"Vaccine discourse in white nationalist online communication: A mixed-methods computational approach", Social Science & Medicine, Yotam Ophir (April 2022).
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 James Gardner. James A. Gardner contributed a chapter, Principios de la libertad de expresión en los Estados Unidos, in Una perspectiva global de derecho penal (Dulce Maria Santana Vega, et al., eds.) (Atelier 2022), an edited volume in honor of Prof. Dr. Joan J. Queralt Jiménez of the University of Barcelona.
Mark G. Frank is a featured expert examining con artists in the Curiosity Stream 6-part series Inside the mind of a con artist Photo of Mark Frank.
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.
Logo for Just the News Yotam Ophir interviewed for “High-profile failures, errors threaten media's credibility with already skeptical public.
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.
Logo of Center of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity Community Lyu has also started INSure+C, a project on AI-synthesized audio detection with two UB undergraduates. They presented their work at the CAE in Cybersecurity community Symposium (6/10/2022).