Keynote Speaker

Professor
University of Michigan

Title:
Deception Detection: When Computers Become Better than Humans

Abstract:
Whether we like it or not, deception happens every day and everywhere: thousands of trials taking place daily around the world; little white lies: “I’m busy that day!” even if your calendar is blank; news “with a twist” (a.k.a. fake news) meant to attract the readers attraction, and get some advertisement clicks on the side; portrayed identities, on dating sites and elsewhere. Can a computer automatically detect deception in written accounts or in video recordings? In this talk, I will describe our work in building linguistic and multimodal algorithms for deception detection, targeting deceptive statements, trial videos, fake news, identity deceptions, and also going after deception in multiple cultures. I will also show how these algorithms can provide insights into what makes a good lie - and thus teach us how to spot a liar. As it turns out, computers can be trained to identify lies in many different contexts, and they can do it much better than humans do!

Bio:
Rada Mihalcea is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Michigan. Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, multilingual natural language processing, and computational social sciences. She serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, Research in Language in Computation, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She was a program co-chair for the Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2011) and the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (2009), and a general chair for the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2015). She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award (2008) and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2009). In 2013, she was made an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.