Russian Election Interference Effectiveness

There were reports of Russia’s interference in the 2016 US elections. In today’s episode, Koustuv Saha, a researcher at Microsoft Research walks us through the effect of targeted ads for political campaigns. Using practical examples, he discusses how targeted ads can propagate fake news, its ripple effects on electioneering, and how to find a sweet spot with targeted ads.

Guest

Koustuv Saha: I am a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Montréal, where I closely work with the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in AI (FATE) group. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing at Georgia Tech and did my undergraduate (B.Tech) in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur. I also hold industry research experience of five years from my pre-PhD days. My research is in the interdisciplinary areas of computational social science and social computing. My research adopts machine learning, natural language, and causal inference analysis to examine human behavior and wellbeing using social media and online data, along with complementary multimodal sensing data. In addition, I am interested in questions relating to understanding the in-practice utility and ecological validity of such wellbeing sensing technologies, such as evaluating the harms and benefits of these technologies, and rethinking the responsible design of these technologies in the real-world.