Time: Wednesdays and Fridays, 10:00am-11:20am
Location: EEB 037
Instructor: Franziska Roesner (Franzi) <franzi@cs.washington.edu>
Office Hours: By Appointment (CSE 654)
Course Mailing List: cse599b_au18@uw.edu
Discussion Board: Google Group
December 2018 Update: Collectively, this class has produced a report summarizing our lessons and recommendations based on our explorations this quarter. You can access that report here: Technology-Enabled Disinformation: Summary, Lessons, and Recommendations.
Technology is increasingly used -- unintentionally (misinformation) or intentionally (disinformation) -- to spread false information at scale, with potentially broad-reaching societal effects. For example, technology enables increasingly realistic false images and videos, and hyper-personal targeting means different people may see different versions of reality. The goals of this course are to study (1) how technologies and today’s technical platforms enable and support the creation and spread of such mis- and disinformation, as well as (2) how technical approaches could be used to mitigate these issues. The coursework will involve readings, discussions, presentations, and open-ended projects. Please note that discussions of politics/sociology/psychology/etc. will generally be considered out of scope, in order for us to focus primarily on the technology and underlying technical questions.
Students with perspectives from any area of computer science and engineering are welcome (and encouraged); there are no prerequisites. This course is limited to Allen School graduate students.