Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Disinformation campaigns are not new – think of wartime propaganda used to sway public opinion against an enemy. What is new, however, is the use of the internet and social media to spread these campaigns. The spread of disinformation via social media has the power to change elections, strengthen conspiracy theories, and sow discord.
Steven Smith, a staff member from MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Artificial Intelligence Software Architectures and Algorithms Group, is part of a team that set out to better understand these campaigns by launching the Reconnaissance of Influence Operations (RIO) program. Their goal was to create a system that would automatically detect disinformation narratives as well as those individuals who are spreading the narratives within social media networks. Earlier this year, the team published a paper on their work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and they received an R&D 100 award last fall.
Investors File Class Action Lawsuit Before the National Court of Spain Over an Alleged $298M Crypto Scam
A group of Spaniards filed the first crypto-related class-action lawsuit before the National Court of Spain on an alleged million-dollar scam. The lawsuit targets an individual accused of allegedly scammed over 300 small crypto investors across Spain.
Money Stolen Could Amount Up to $3.58 Billion
Per El País, the class-action lawsuit claims that an individual named Javier Biosca Rodríguez allegedly scammed over 250 million euros ($298 million) in cryptocurrencies from the investors.
The profile of the victims is mixed, starting from domestic employees, retirees, unemployed, even notaries, a judge, lawyers, tax inspectors, and owners of small businesses who tried to recover from the coronavirus-driven economic crisis.
Photo by Jason Koski, graphic design by Rob Kurcoba/Cornell University
Administrators knew Cornell could host in-person classes only if students could sit at least 6 feet apart; they turned to the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering to optimize the university’s classrooms. Model makers: How engineers saved the fall, spring semesters
January 28, 2021
As the spring semester begins, a team of engineering students and faculty has finished tweaking the master schedule, using lessons they learned last fall during their heroic effort to help Cornell have safe, in-person classes.
University leaders faced a critical question in April 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic surged and they contemplated an in-person fall semester: Would it even be possible?