Public Talks

  1. December 10/12/2019
    The coordinator of ENCASE, Dr. Michael Sirivianos presented ENCASE during the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Artificial Intelligence Cluster event. The event took place on December 10-11, 2019 and it was organized by the European Research Executive Agency (REA).
  2. November 08/11/2019
    TechRepublic‘s Karen Roby talked with Dr. Gianluca Stringhini from Boston University about our new research focusing on online hate speech, harassment, and 4chan organized raid compaigns on YouTube.
  3. October 18/10/2019
    ENCASE Final Workshop: “Cybersafety: Threats and Intelligent Parental Advice Tools for Protection in Social Networks”
    Video Streams:
    ENCASE Final Workshop: “Cybersafety: Threats and Intelligent Parental Advice Tools for Protection in Social Networks” Part 1
    ENCASE Final Workshop: “Cybersafety: Threats and Intelligent Parental Advice Tools for Protection in Social Networks” Part 2
    ENCASE Final Workshop: “Cybersafety: Threats and Intelligent Parental Advice Tools for Protection in Social Networks” Part 3
    ENCASE Final Workshop: “Cybersafety: Threats and Intelligent Parental Advice Tools for Protection in Social Networks” Part 4
    ENCASE Final Workshop: “Cybersafety: Threats and Intelligent Parental Advice Tools for Protection in Social Networks” Part 5
  4. October 18/10/2019
    Dr. Nicolas Kourtellis presents methods for analyzing the multiple facets of cyber-aggression on social media
    Dr. Nicolas Kourtellis from Telefonica Research talked about his research on analysing the multiple facets of cyber-aggression on social media at the Security@home series event that took place at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.
    Abstract:
    In this talk, I will cover problems and raise awareness on the following issues: 1) Cyberbullying and cyberaggression on Twitter and other social media. 2) Attacks on YouTube and disturbing YouTube videos targeting kids. I will discuss behaviors, trends, and other insights after conducting detailed analysis to identify red flags of such potential activity or risk, so the kids and the parents can look for these signs and try to battle or even prevent these problems from arising. This research work is mainly supported by the Marie Curie EU Project Encase. Papers, Code and Tools can be found here: https://encase.socialcomputing.eu
  1. September 27/09/2019
    The Social Computing Research Center (http://socialcomputing.eu) at the Cyprus University of Technology participated in the Researcher’s Night event which took place in Nicosia, Filoxenia Conference Centre on September 27, 2019.During this event, Cyprus University of Technology researchers presented and demonstrated the Parental Advice Tools for Protection in Social Networks to primary and high school students, educators, parents, industry, and the general public.

    The audience had the opportunity to interact with the Parental Advice Tools and to provide feedback regarding their experience, as well as the operation and the usability of the tools.
  2. June, 26/06/2019
    Savvas Zannettou was invited by ACM SIGMETRICS 2019 to present the ENCASE ACM IMC 2018 paper “On The Origins Of Memes By Means Of Fringe Web Communities“.
  3. June, 18/06/2019
    Dr. Emiliano De Christofaro from University College London participated in the Workshop on Federated Learning and Analytics that took place at Google Seattle, USA. He gave a talk on Exploiting Unintended Feature Leakage in Collaborative Learning.
    The presentation can be found here.
  4. June, 08/06/2019
    Antonis Papasavva from the Cyprus University of Technology participated in the workshop “Combating Misinformation Through Media Literacy“. During the workshop, the ENCASE tools were demonstrated with the aid of live demos. The attendants of the workshop had the opportunity to test the ENCASE tools in real time.
  5. June, 07/06/2019
    Researchers from the Datalab of the Department of Informatics of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki participated in the 1st Summit on Gender Equality in Computing. The researchers presented the work and research they conducted in the ENCASE project.
    The presentation can be found here.

    The poster can be found here.
  6. June, 04/06/2019
    Dr. Ioannis Arapakis from Telefónica Research gave a talk to the M.Sc. in “Data and Web Science” students at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki about weblogs analytics and users clustering.
  7. May, 14/05/2019
    Prof. Athena Vakali from the Aristotelio University of Thessaloniki gives a talk about hate, aggression and polarized community detection in online social media at the Anatolia College of Thessaloniki. Among other matters, prof. Vakali mentioned the research conducted by AUTH in ENCASE and what patterns those malicious actors use in online social media to avoid their detection and preserve their anonymity. Presentation here.
  8. May, 14/05/2019
    Antonis Papasavva from the Cyprus University of Technology was invited by the Anatolia College of Thessaloniki to give a talk about the threats in social media. Among others, Antonis Papasavva talked about hate, raid, sexual grooming, privacy, and racist memes in social media. In addition, the awareness activities organized by the CyberSafety II project, and the research conducted by ENCASE were mentioned. About 150 students (ages 13-14) and 10 educators participated in this event. Presentation here.
  9. May, 13/05/2019
    Antonis Papasavva from the Cyprus University of Technology was invited by the 1st primary school of Agioi Anargiroi in Athens, to talk about the threats in social media and how to stay safe. Antonis Papasavva talked about hate, raid, sexual grooming, privacy, and racist memes in social media and advised the young users on how to stay protected against these threats. In addition, the awareness activities organized by the CyberSafety II project, and the research conducted by ENCASE were mentioned. About 100 students (ages 7-12) and 12 educators participated in this event.
    Presentation here.
  10. May, 13/05/2019
    Savvas Zannettou from the Cyprus University of Technology gives a talk about Vladimir’s “dezinformatsiya” operations and their outsized influence on the broader Web at the Cybersafety 2019 workshop, co-located with The Web conference 2019, in San Francisco. The presentation can be found here.
  11. May, 13/05/2019
    Dr. Barry Bradlyn from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign gives a talk about Content Security at Reddit and Statistical Mechanics at Cybersafety 2019, San Francisco.
  12. May, 13/05/2019
    Dr. Gianluca Stringhini from Boston University gave a keynote titled “Computational Methods to Understand and Mitigate Online Hate” to a full room at Cybersafety 2019, San Francisco. The presentation can be found here.
  13. April, 16/04/2019
    Dr. Michael Sirivianos was invited to talk about ENCASE project and fake news, on the event with the title: “Fake News: The truth in the age of the internet”.
    The event is hosted by the Youth Board of Cyprus and Erasmus+ Youth Cyprus, and it took place at Hellenic Bank’s Administration offices in Cyprus. The main speakers of the event will be “Greek Hoaxes” and George Pavlides (Chairman of the Journalism Ethics Committee, Electronic Media, Member of the Union of Cyprus Journalists and Professor of Journalism). “Greek Hoaxes” is the first, and so far unique, concerted effort to shoot false online news.
    Also, journalist Marinos Nomikos participated as a speaker to this event.
    The discussion was coordinated by the Executive Director of the Youth Organization, Menelaos A. Menelaou.

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  14. April, 13-14/04/2019
    Dr. Michael Sirivianos, from the Cyprus University of Technology, was invited to participate in the discussion with the title: “How can journalists, scientists, and the public, in their way, prevent misinformation of the media?”. An event organized by the Cultural Institute of the Bank of Cyprus. Myrtani Pieri and Nicolas Zannettos (Chief Editor of Alpha TV in Cyprus) took part in the discussion. The moderator of the discussion was Louiza Sophocleous.

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  15. April, 03/04/2019
    Dr. Michael Sirivianos from the Cyprus University of Technology was invited from the University of Nicosia to talk to a seminar, titled “On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities”.
    Dr. Sirivianos talked about ENCASE project goals and aims. In addition, he discussed our research “On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities” and how “funny” images (memes) may be used to disseminate hate and radicalization, and what ENCASE is trying to do to detect and stop this.
    Approximately 20 people from academia attended this seminar.
    Details about the seminar can be found here.
  16. February, 25/02/2019
    Dr. Evangelos Kotsifakos from LSTech was invited from the Open University of Municipality of Peristerion, Athens, Greece to give a talk about protecting online privacy. Dr. Kotsifakos presented the aspects of personal data, the threats that users face online as well as the related regulations focusing on GDPR, the obligations of the companies and the rights of the data subjects. Furthermore, he discussed the threats that especially minors are facing when they are sharing personal data online. In this context, he also presented the ENCASE project and its objectives.
  17. January, 24/01/2019
    Antonis Papasavva talks about the ENCASE system and its functionalities during the CYberSafety Kick-Off meeting.
    The presentation can be found here.
  18. June, 14/06/2018
    Dr. Emiliano De Cristofaro presents the Studying jerks on the Internet: data-driven measurements of cyberbullying, hate, and misinformation
    Dr. Emiliano De Cristofaro from the UCL presented his research about Studying jerks on the Internet: data-driven measurements of cyberbullying, hate, and misinformation, in the Summer School at  Å ibenik, Croatia .
  19. June, 04/06/2018
    Dr. Nicolas Kourtellis presents methods for analyzing the multiple facets of cyber-aggression on social media
    Dr. Nicolas Kourtellis from Telefonica Research talked about his research in analyzing the multiple facets of cyber-aggression on social media at the Computer Science Colloquium Series event that took place at the University of Cyprus.
    Abstract:
    In recent years, offensive, abusive and hateful language, sexism, racism and other types of aggressive and cyberbullying behavior have been manifesting with increased frequency, and in many online social media platforms. In fact, past scientific work focused on studying these forms in popular media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Ask.fm, etc. However, these platforms have not adequately addressed the problem of online abusive behavior, and their responsiveness, as well as effective detection and blocking of such inappropriate behavior remain limited. In this talk, I will cover our recent works, in which we propose a set of algorithms to detect and mitigate such complex user behavior. In these studies, we collect, analyze and annotate user content from Twitter, and employ advanced machine and deep learning approaches to detect online aggressive behavior, in its various facets. We use a diverse set of features, extracted from textual, user and network-related activities of Twitter users, and demonstrate that such characteristics can boost the algorithmic performance for detection cyber-aggression. Furthermore, we make our collected and annotated datasets and algorithms publicly available for further research and development by the scientific community. This research has been supported by the Marie Sklodowska Curie RISE EU project ENCASE, No 691025.
    More information about the event can be found here: https://www.cs.ucy.ac.cy
  20. May, 22/05/2018
    Dr. Michael Sirivianos from the Cyprus University of Technology presents ENCASE research at the “Are we ”data”? ”-“ Identity, journalism, democracy in the age of big data” NOTRE public event
    The EU funded project NOTRE (https://notre.socialcomputing.eu/) organized a public event with the title: “Are we data? Identity, journalism, democracy in the age of big data”. Dr. Michael Sirivianos was invited to present ENCASE’s “The Web Centipede: Understanding How Web Communities Influence Each Other Through the Lens of Mainstream and Alternative News Sources”.
    For the agenda and more information, please see here.
  21. May, 05/05/2018
    Dr. Michael Sirivianos from the Cyprus University of Technology presents ENCASE at the “Screen Free Week Cyprus” annual event
    Baby Academy (https://www.babyacademycy.com/en/home/) is a Non-Profit Organization founded by parents in order to offer support to new and soon-to-be parents, through both scientifically proven and practical information. With this objective in mind, the academy contributed to the “Screen Free Week” annual event by organizing a seminar. This event aims to motivate parents and children to rediscover the joys of life beyond the screen.Dr. Sirivianos was invited to present ENCASE’s goals and research in order to spread awareness about the threats social media pose to minors, countermeasures, and how the ENCASE tools can help protect children.
    You can see the presentation here.
    You can see the 5-day seminar schedule here.
    You can see the leaflet here.
  22. March, 27/03/2018
    Dr. Nicolas Kourtellis presents methods for analyzing the multiple facets of cyber-aggression on social media
    Dr. Nicolas Kourtellis from Telefonica Research talked about his research in analyzing the multiple facets of cyber-aggression on social media at the Institute of Computer Science (ICS) of the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH).
    More information can be found here : www.ics.forth.gr
  23. March, 07/03/2018
    Dr Gianluca Stringhini from UCL at the UK Parliament
    Dr Gianluca Stringhini from UCL was a witness to the International Relations Committee at the UK Parliament. He talked about his research, which focuses on cybercrime and how organized criminals and groups use technology and the Internet to perpetrate crimes. The discussion was around the threats and challenges of cyber state and non-state actors in the UK against such crimes.
    Watch the recording here: parliamentlive.tv
       
  24. January, 31/01/2018

    ENCASE at the H2020 Project Clustering Workshop
    ENCASE attended the H2020 Project Clustering Workshop that took place in Athens on the 31st of January. This workshop was organized by the ReCRED project, which along with another 21 H2020 projects, spent the day sharing their innovative ideas and goals.
    The ENCASE Project was presented by Dr. Michael Sirvianos from the Cyprus University of Technology. The presentation consisted of the initial incentive that urged the ENCASE consortium to research and develop innovative ways for protecting minors in Online Social Networks. In addition, it highlighted the ENCASE Architecture and the Design Principles of the project along with its ambitions and aims.

    Download the ENCASE presentation here.

    Download the Workshop agenda here.

    For more details about the event and the participants: https://www.recred.eu/basic-page/169/synergies
  25. June, 24/06/2017
    Antonia Gogoglou from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, SignalGeneriX Ltd Cyprus did a presentation about the ENCASE Project at the Data Intelligence Conference.
    More details  can be found here:
    http://data-intelligence.ai/presentations/4
  26. April, 10/04/2017
    Associate Prof. Nick Bassiliades of the Aristotle University will be visiting CUT to present a lecture on Web Information Extraction, Semantic Entity Identification and Linking. The talk will cover some aspects of Web Information Extraction so that extracted entities can be uniquely identified by semantic similarity search.
    More information can be found here:
    http://www.cut.ac.cy/events/article/?contentId=134155
    http://www.cut.ac.cy/news/article/?contentId=134220
  27. April, 03/04/2017
    At the Aristotle University premises, a presentation took place within the framework of sharing knowledge derived from the activities of the ENCASE European Marie Curie Program.
    More information can be found here:
    http://oswinds.csd.auth.gr/news/encase-cases-re-integration-secondees-%E2%80%93-sharing-knowledge
  28. March, 08/03/2017
    Savvas Zannettou, a PhD student from Cyprus University of Technology, covered the aspects of the clickbait problem on the YouTube platform during a talk at IMDEA premises on 08/03/17. During his talk, the participants were presented with several examples of clickbaits on the YouTube and the various misleading techniques that are used by the video uploaders. He also presented an innovative deep learning model for discerning clickbait videos in an automated manner.
    More information can be found here:
    http://netcom.it.uc3m.es/events/2017/good-bad-and-bait-detecting-and-characterizing-clickbait-videos-youtube
  29. September, 01/09/2016 ”“ 02/09/2016:
    During the16th International School on Foundations of Security Analysis and Design Programme, Dr Emiliano De Cristofaro presented “Privacy-preserving Information Sharing: Tools and Applications.
    The presentation can be found here:
    http://www.sti.uniurb.it/events/fosad16/fosad-1.pdf
  30. May, 18/05/2016:
    A presentation was organised at the Elementary School of Kapsalos ”“ Limassol, Cyprus, focusing on advising parents and children on the safe use of the Internet. More information can be found here:
    http://www.elemesos.com/index.php/item/21762-2016-05-18-13-39-31.html

  31. May, 16/05/2016:
    The Parents Association of Elementary School of Kapsalos ”“ Limassol, Cyprus, organised a presentation for the protection of minors from malicious actors in online social networks. Dr. Sirivianos Michael Lecturer in Computer Engineering and Informatics at TEPAK presented advice on the safe use of the internet by children and their guardians.
    More information can be found here:
    http://www.elemesos.com/index.php/item/21706-2016-05-16-06-10-52.html 
    You can see the presentation here: Kapsalos Talk
  32. March, 10/03/2016 ”“ 12/03/2016:
    Prof. Panayiotis Zaphiris presented the ENCASE project at the IFIP TC13 Open Symposium. The meeting took place between March 10th and March 12th, 2016 at the University of West London, UK.
    Details of the symposium can be found here:
    http://ifip-tc13.org/ifip-tc13-open-symposium-on-hci-london-2016/
  33. February, 18/02/2016:
    The ENCASE kick-off meeting took place in Limassol, Cyprus successfully. It was organized and hosted by the Cyprus University of Technology at Auditorium 1 Building Tassos Papadopoulos.
    The live streaming of the ENCASE Kick-off meeting can be found here:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrUXmfUcQ-M