#luddy school of informatics computing and engineering

[misterparadigm]

Looky what I won. I teach 2D Animation at university, if I hadn't mentioned that before. Got my first award for it today.

[technofeudalism]

A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why. Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to his employer, he has served as principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million over his 21 years there.

checking around the internet and seeing how this is being reacted to by the average online liberalish person, the common reception to this particular incident is "I can’t tell if they got disappeared by the FBI or China" and "Rumor has it that the FBI took him into custody on espionage charges." even though there are kidnappings being carried out in broad daylight right now.

so this goes along with pro-Palestine/Arab -> supporting terrorism and Venezuelan/Latino -> supporting TdA. now, if you're Chinese -> kidnapped by China/actually a spy.

once again, i repeat: until it happens to an upper-middle class white person with any sort of public prominence or who is towards the upper ends of the social hierarchy, Americans will keep finding excuses as to why this might be okay after all. they'll just check back in 2 weeks and see if this one is actually justifiable.

[mariacallous]

A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer, Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.

Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to his employer, he has served as principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million over his 21 years there.

He has also coauthored scores of academic papers on a diverse range of research fields, including cryptography, systems security, and data privacy, including the protection of human genomic data. I have personally spoken to him on three occasions for articles here, here, and here.

“None of This Is in Any Way Normal”

In recent weeks, Wang's email account, phone number, and profile page at the Luddy School were quietly erased by his employer. Over the same time, Indiana University also removed a profile for his wife, Nianli Ma, who was listed as a lead systems analyst and programmer at the university's Library Technologies division.

As reported by The Bloomingtonian and later the The Herald-Times in Bloomington, a small fleet of unmarked cars driven by government agents descended on the Bloomington home of Wang and Ma on Friday. They spent most of the day going in and out of the house and occasionally transferred boxes from their vehicles. TV station WTHR, meanwhile, reported that a second home owned by Wang and Ma, located in Carmel, Indiana, was also searched. The station said that both a resident and an attorney for the resident were on scene during at least part of the search.

Attempts to locate Wang and Ma have so far been unsuccessful. An Indiana University spokesman didn't answer emailed questions asking if the couple was still employed by the university and why their profile pages, email addresses, and phone numbers had been removed. The spokesman provided the contact information for a spokeswoman at the FBI's field office in Indianapolis. In an email, the spokeswoman wrote: “The FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity at homes in Bloomington and Carmel Friday. We have no further comment at this time.”

Searches of federal court dockets turned up no documents related to Wang, Ma, or any searches of their residences. The FBI spokeswoman didn't answer questions seeking which US district court issued the warrant and when, and whether either Wang or Ma is being detained by authorities. Justice Department representatives didn't return an email seeking the same information. An email sent to a personal email address belonging to Wang went unanswered at the time this post went live. Their resident status (e.g., US citizens or green card holders) is currently unknown.

Fellow researchers took to social media over the weekend to register their concern over the series of events.

“None of this is in any way normal,” Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: “Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???”

In the same thread, Matt Blaze, a McDevitt professor of computer science and law at Georgetown University, said, “It's hard to imagine what reason there could be for the university to scrub its website as if he never worked there. And while there's a process for removing tenured faculty, it takes more than an afternoon to do it.”

Local news outlets reported the agents spent several hours moving boxes in an out of the residences. WTHR provided the following details about the raid on the Carmel home:

Neighbors say the agents announced "FBI, come out!" over a megaphone.

A woman came out of the house holding a phone. A video from a neighbor shows an agent taking that phone from her. She was then questioned in the driveway before agents began searching the home, collecting evidence and taking photos.

A car was pulled out of the garage slightly to allow investigators to access the attic.

The woman left the house before 13News arrived. She returned just after noon accompanied by a lawyer. The group of 10 or so investigators left a few minutes later.

The FBI would not say what they were looking for or who is under investigation. A bureau spokesperson issued a statement: “I can confirm we conducted court-authorized activity at the address in Carmel today. We have no further comment at this time.”

Investigators were at the house for about four hours before leaving with several boxes of evidence. 13News rang the doorbell when the agents were gone. A lawyer representing the family who answered the door told us they're not sure yet what the investigation is about.

This post will be updated if new details become available. Anyone with firsthand knowledge of events involving Wang, Ma, or the investigation into either is encouraged to contact me, preferably over Signal at DanArs.82. The email address is: dan.goodin@arstechnica.com.

[sab-cat]

Mar 30, 2025

A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer, Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.

Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to his employer, he has served as principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million over his 21 years there.

[scientificinquirer-blog]

Study proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding complex higher-order networks

Filippo Radicchi, professor of Informatics at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, co-authored a ground-breaking study that could lead to the development of new AI algorithms and new ways to study brain function. The study, titled “Topology shapes dynamics of higher-order networks,” and published in Nature Physics, proposed a theoretical framework specifically designed…

[k12academics]

You can improve health care systems and enhance the patient experience—without becoming a nurse or physician. Develop sought-after skills that lead to employment with a Health Information Management (HIM) degree or Medical Coding certificate online through the IU Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indianapolis. Direct Admit deadline is November 1.

[kathleenseiber]

Political bias on Twitter comes from users, not the platform

Political bias on Twitter emerges from users, not the platform itself, according to a new study.

In this era of political polarization, many accuse online social media platforms such as Twitter of liberal bias, intentionally favoring and amplifying liberal content and users while suppressing other political content.

But the new study finds this is not the case. Political biases, the researchers found, stem from the social interactions of our accounts—we receive content closely aligned with whatever our online friends produce, especially our very first online friends. Also, political biases on Twitter favor conservative content.

“Our main finding is that the information Twitter users see in their news feed depends on the political leaning of their earliest connections,” says coauthor Filippo Menczer of Indiana University. “We found no evidence of intentional interference by the platform. Instead, bias can be explained by the use, and abuse, of the platform by its users.”

To uncover biases in online news and information to which people are exposed on Twitter, the researchers deployed 15 bots, called “drifters” to distinguish their neutral behavior from other types of social bots on Twitter. The drifters mimicked human users but were controlled by algorithms that activated them randomly to perform actions.

After initializing each bot with one first friend from a popular news source aligned with the left, center-left, center, center-right, or right of the US political spectrum, the researchers let the drifters loose “in the wild” on Twitter.

The researchers collected data on the drifters daily. After five months, they examined the content consumed and generated by the drifters, analyzing the political alignment of the bots’ friends and followers and their exposure to information from low-credibility news and information sources.

The research revealed that the political alignment of an initial friend on social media has a major impact on the structure of a user’s social network and their exposure to low-credibility sources.

“Early choices about which sources to follow impact the experiences of social media users,” Menczer says.

The study found that drifters tended to be drawn to the political right. Drifters with right-wing initial friends were gradually embedded into homogeneous networks where they were exposed to more right-leaning and low-credibility content. They even started to spread right-leaning content themselves. They also tended to follow more automated accounts.

Because the drifters were designed to be neutral, the partisan nature of the content they consumed and produced reflects biases in the “online information ecosystem” created by user interactions, according to Menczer.

“Online influence is affected by the echo-chamber characteristics of the social network,” he says. “Drifters following more partisan news sources received more politically aligned followers, becoming embedded in denser echo chambers.”

To avoid getting stuck in online echo chambers, users must make extra efforts to moderate the content they consume and the social ties they form, according to coauthor Diogo Pacheco, a former postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University-Bloomington who is now a lecturer in computer science at Exeter University.

“We hope this study increases awareness among social media users about the implicit biases of their online connections and their vulnerabilities to being exposed to selective information, or worse, such as influence campaigns, manipulation, misinformation, and polarization,” says Pacheco. “How to design mechanisms capable of mitigating biases in online information ecosystems is a key question that remains open for debate.”

The study appears in the journal Nature Communications. The authors are a team of researchers from the Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe, pronounced awesome) at Indiana University-Bloomington, led by Menczer, who is director of OSoMe and a professor of informatics and computer science at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. The Observatory on Social Media at IU Bloomington gets support in part from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research.

Source: Indiana University

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[scienceblogtumbler]

New model of human brain ‘conversations’ could inform research on brain disease, cognition

A team of Indiana University neuroscientists has built a new model of human brain networks that sheds light on how the brain functions.

The model offers a new tool for exploring individual differences in brain networks, which is critical to classifications of brain disorders and disease, as well as for understanding human behavior and cognitive abilities. The model highlights different brain structures — cells, groups of cells or specific regions — and the ongoing, overlapping series of “conversations” between those structures, which are tracked on a more precise time scale than has been previously afforded by other approaches.

“The model gives us a new perspective on the brain that adds clarity to what we already know about how the brain functions,” said Richard Betzel, senior author of a new study in Nature Neuroscience. Betzel is a professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. “It highlights new organizational features that we hope to use down the road as diagnostic tools or as biomarkers for certain disorders.”

Because the new model vividly depicts individual differences in brain networks — the idiosyncratic signature or fingerprint that distinguishes one person’s brain networks from another — the researchers believe it could be useful for classifying brain disorders and disease.

Richard Betzel. Photo courtesy of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Betzel’s lab has begun to use the model in classifications of autism spectrum disorder with IU psychological and brain sciences autism researcher Dan Kennedy. Working with researchers at the Indiana Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the IU School of Medicine, IU neuroscientist Olaf Sporns has begun to use the model in the context of dementia, memory tasks and executive tasks, to see if they can find a marker for those at risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

The model can also help researchers understand how brain networks correlate to certain kinds of behavior or abilities regarding cognitive tasks.

“We’ve only scratched the surface,” said Sporns, Betzel’s collaborator on the study. “This is what makes the project so exciting: There’s a sense of something new.”

‘Snippets of conversation in a crowded room’

Using three large pre-existing datasets, the researchers constructed their model by drawing on the theoretical work of IU network scientist Yong Yeol Ahn, an associate professor in the IU Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering. Instead of modeling the interactions among network “nodes,” each of which represents a different brain structure, the researchers built a model of the brain where “edges” — the connections between the nodes — were front and center.

Olaf Sporns. Photo by Maximillian Tortoriello Photography

By taking this step, “we shifted the focus onto how pairs of brain regions converse and communicate across time,” Betzel said. “Instead of saying that activations in two parts of the brain are correlated, we get a signal of the conversation itself. Our networks are telling us about co-activity, the conversations, which nobody has done before.”

Continuing the analogy, Sporns, “One way we think about these edge communities is as patterns of how brain regions talk to each other, as snippets of conversation in a crowded room.”

The shift from nodes to edges adds layers of complexity not present in the old model. The new edge-centric approach used a total of 200 nodes, or 200 brain structures, with 19,900 connections between them and looks at the links between these connections. The links between those 19,990 connections is well over 150 million.

“While it’s more complicated to keep track of so many numbers, and requires more powerful computers, looking at the data through this new lens uncovers a lot of connections we couldn’t previously see,” said Joshua Faskowitz, a collaborator and graduate student in Sporns’ lab. “It uncovers relationships that the traditional node-centric approach wouldn’t have been sensitive to before.”

As Betzel put it, “We have a different lens through which to look at the brain.”

Pervasive overlap

Joshua Faskowitz. Photo courtesy of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

A key advantage to the model is the view it provides of “pervasive overlap,” the extent to which each brain structure participates in multiple ongoing conversations. The new model represents the multifunctionality of brain regions, with every part of the brain participating in several functions.

“We’re arguing that this pervasive overlap may be a fundamental feature of the brain,” Betzel said. “We’re painting a picture of the brain where there’s a lot more interaction than we had seen before.”

In addition to Betzel, Sporns and Faskowitz, authors include postdoctoral associate Farnaz Zamani Esfahlani and graduate student Youngheun Jo, both in Betzel’s Brain Networks and Behavior Lab in the IU Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

The paper received support from an IU Emerging Areas of Research grant and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

IU Research

Indiana University’s world-class researchers have driven innovation and creative initiatives that matter for 200 years. From curing testicular cancer to collaborating with NASA to search for life on Mars, IU has earned its reputation as a world-class research institution. Supported by $854 million last year from our partners, IU researchers are building collaborations and uncovering new solutions that improve lives in Indiana and around the globe.

A team of Indiana University neuroscientists has built a new model of human brain networks that sheds light on how the brain functions.

source https://scienceblog.com/519118/new-model-of-human-brain-conversations-could-inform-research-on-brain-disease-cognition/

[findhired]

via FindHired

[k12academics]

You can improve health care systems and enhance the patient experience—without becoming a nurse or physician. Develop sought-after skills that lead to employment with a Health Information Management (HIM) degree through the IU Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at IUPUI. Applications open August 1.

[kathleenseiber]

Putting ‘red flags’ on misinformation may cut sharing

Pairing headlines with credibility alerts from fact-checkers, the public, news media, and even artificial intelligence, can reduce peoples’ intention to share misinformation on social media, researchers report.

The dissemination of fake news on social media is a pernicious trend with dire implications for the 2020 presidential election.

Credibility indicators are less likely to influence men, who are more inclined to share fake news on social media.

Indeed, research shows that public engagement with spurious news is greater than with legitimate news from mainstream sources, making social media a powerful channel for propaganda.

The new study also shows the effectiveness of alerts about misinformation varies with political orientation and gender.

The good news for truth seekers? People overwhelmingly trust official fact-checking sources.

The study, led by Nasir Memon, professor of computer science and engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, and Sameer Patil, visiting research professor at NYU Tandon and assistant professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington, goes further, examining the effectiveness of a specific set of inaccuracy notifications designed to alert readers to news headlines that are inaccurate or untrue.

Warnings about misinformation on social media

The work involved an online study of around 1,500 individuals to measure the effectiveness among different groups of four so-called “credibility indicators” displayed beneath headlines:

Fact Checkers: “Multiple fact-checking journalists dispute the credibility of this news”

News Media: “Major news outlets dispute the credibility of this news”

Public: “A majority of Americans disputes the credibility of this news”

AI: “Computer algorithms using AI dispute the credibility of this news”

“We wanted to discover whether social media users were less apt to share fake news when it was accompanied by one of these indicators and whether different types of credibility indicators exhibit different levels of influence on people’s sharing intent,” says Memon. “But we also wanted to measure the extent to which demographic and contextual factors like age, gender, and political affiliation impact the effectiveness of these indicators.”

Participants—over 1,500 US residents—saw a sequence of 12 true, false, or satirical news headlines. Only the false or satirical headlines included a credibility indicator below the headline in red font. For all of the headlines, researchers asked respondents if they would share the corresponding article with friends on social media, and why.

Republicans are less likely to be influenced by credibility indicators, more inclined to share fake news on social media. (Credit: NYU)

“Upon initial inspection, we found that political ideology and affiliation were highly correlated to responses and that the strength of individuals’ political alignments made no difference, whether Republican or Democrat,” says Memon. “The indicators impacted everyone regardless of political orientation, but the impact on Democrats was much larger compared to the other two groups.”

The most effective of the credibility indicators, by far, was Fact Checkers: Study respondents intended to share 43% fewer non-true headlines with this indicator versus 25%, 22%, and 22% for the “News Media,” “Public,” and “AI” indicators, respectively.

How politics affects things

The team found a strong correlation between political affiliation and the propensity of each of the credibility indicators to influence intention to share.

In fact, the AI credibility indicator actually induced Republicans to increase their intention to share non-true news:

Democrats intended to share 61% fewer non-true headlines with the Fact Checkers indicator (versus 40% for Independents and 19% for Republicans).

Democrats intended to share 36% fewer non-true headlines with the News Media indicator (versus 29% for Independents and 4.5% for Republicans).

Democrats intended to share 37% fewer non-true headlines with the Public indicator, (versus 17% for Independents and 6.7% for Republicans).

Democrats intended to share 40% fewer non-true headlines with the AI indicator (versus 16% for Independents).

Republicans intended to share 8.1% more non-true news with the AI indicator.

Credibility indicators are less likely to influence men, who are more inclined to share fake news on social media. But indicators, especially those from fact-checkers, reduce intention to share fake news across the board. (Credit: NYU)

Patil says that, while fact-checkers are the most effective kind of indicator, regardless of political affiliation and gender, fact-checking is a very labor-intensive. He says the team was surprised by the fact that Republicans were more inclined to share news that was flagged as not credible using the AI indicator.

“We were not expecting that, although conservatives may tend to trust more traditional means of flagging the veracity of news,” he says, adding that the team will next examine how to make the most effective credibility indicator—fact-checkers—efficient enough to handle the scale inherent in today’s news climate.

“This could include applying fact checks to only the most-needed content, which might involve applying natural language algorithms. So, it is a question, broadly speaking, of how humans and AI could co-exist,” he explains.

The team also found that males intended to share non-true headlines one and half times more than females, with the differences largest for the public and news media indicators.

Credibility indicators are less likely to influence men, who are more inclined to share fake news on social media. But indicators, especially those from fact-checkers, reduce intention to share fake news across the board.

Socializing was the dominant reason respondents gave for intending to share a headline, with the top-reported reason for intending to share fake stories being that they were considered funny.

The research appears in ACM Digital Library.

Source: NYU

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