Walter Scheirer

Website

• Article

  An AI Early Warning System to Monitor Online Disinformation, Stop Violence, and Protect Elections

  By: Walter Scheirer, Tim Weninger, Michael Yankoski

  Appeared In: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  The authors are developing an AI early warning system to monitor how manipulated content online—such as altered photos in memes—leads, in some cases, to violent conflict and societal instability.

• Article

  A Pandemic of Bad Science

  By: Walter Scheirer

  Appeared In: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  That there has been an extraordinary level of interest in coronavirus science during the COVID-19 pandemic should come as no surprise, but this has unintended consequences.

• Article

  Pitfalls in Machine Learning Research: Reexamining the Development Cycle

  By: Stella Biderman, Walter Scheirer

  Appeared In: NeurIPS Conference

  Machine learning research has the potential to fuel further advances in data science, but it is greatly hindered by an ad hoc design process, poor data hygiene, and a lack of statistical rigor.

• Article

  The “Criminality From Face” Illusion

  By: Kevin Bowyer, Michael King, Walter Scheirer, Kushal Vangara

  Appeared In: IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society

  A few recent publications have claimed success in analyzing an image of a person’s face in order to predict the person’s status as criminal/non-criminal. This is very dangerous.

• Article

  Meme Warfare: AI countermeasures to disinformation should focus on popular, not perfect, fakes

  By: Walter Scheirer, Tim Weninger, Michael Yankoski

  Appeared In: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  From QAnon conspiracy theories to Russian government-sponsored election interference, social media disinformation campaigns are a part of online life, and identifying these threats is a challenge.

• Article

  Automatic Discovery of Meme Genres with Diverse Appearances

  By: Joel Brogan, Daniel Moreira, Pascal Phoa, Walter Scheirer, William Theisen, Pamela Bilo Thomas, Tim Weninger

  Appeared In: Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

  This paper introduces a scalable automated visual recognition pipeline for discovering meme genres of diverse appearance, work relevant to the study of political disinformation campaigns.