Deepfake Conference Panel I: Deepfakes as a Technical Problem

Presented by Technology Ethics Center

How can truth emerge in a deep-fake ridden marketplace of ideas? Are we ready for the looming challenges to national security, elections, privacy, and reputation? What role will technology, laws, and norms play in addressing deep-fake destruction?

The Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center explored these questions and others during a series of panel discussions featuring leading academic, industry and policy experts.

Panel I features Charles William Harrison (Purdue University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering), Pat Flynn (Notre Dame Department of Computer Science and Engineering), and Ser-Nam Lim (Facebook).

The Deepfake Conference was held on October 18, 2019, in Washington, D.C. The following talks were also recorded:

Speaker Bios for Panel I

Nitesh Chawla is the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, and Director of the Center on Network and Data Science (CNDS) at the University of Notre Dame. His research is focused on AI, machine learning, and network science fundamentals with interdisciplinary applications that address societal problems and advance the common good. He is the recipient of several awards and honors including the NIPS Classification Challenge Award, IEEE CIS Outstanding Early Career Award, the IBM Watson Faculty Award, the IBM Big Data and Analytics Faculty Award, the National Academy of Engineering New Faculty Fellowship, and 1st Source Bank Technology Commercialization Award. He has also received several best paper awards and nominations, and his students have also received several distinct honors and awards. In recognition of the societal and impact of his research, he was recognized with the Rodney Ganey Award and Michiana 40 Under 40. He is co-founder of Aunalytics, a data science software and solutions company.

Patrick Flynn is chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the Duda Family Professor of Engineering, and a concurrent professor of electrical engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests include computer vision, biometrics, pattern recognition, computer graphics and scientific visualization, and mobile application development. Flynn has held faculty positions at Washington State University and The Ohio State University. In 2007–2008, he held a visiting scientist appointment at the National Institute of Standards and Technology during a sabbatical leave. He has received outstanding teaching awards from Washington State University and the University of Notre Dame and meritorious service, Golden Core, certificate of achievement, and technical achievement awards from the IEEE Computer Society. He earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, master’s degree in computer science, and doctorate in computer science from Michigan State University.

Ser-Nam Lim manages Facebook AI’s Computer Vision teams in the New York and Cambridge offices. His current research interests lie in the understanding of generative models, particularly in large scale generation, anomaly detection, representation learning, media manipulation and multimodal analysis. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Vision at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2005. Previously, he spent a decade at GE Research, where he was manager of the Computer Vision Lab, led several major company research initiatives, and was also PI of the IARPA CORE3D program. At Facebook, he is currently leading his team in an effort to detect media manipulation that has the potential to spread misinformation.