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Are Fair Elections Possible In The Age Of AI?
4 December 2024

From cyber attacks to co-ordinated disinformation and AI-generated deep fakes, fair elections in Australia and around the world are facing unprecedented and complex threats.
What do we need to know to understand these challenges and address them effectively? What should citizens, journalists, policy-makers, researchers and politicians be doing to protect fair elections?
This one day workshop, held in the historic Council Chamber of the Francis Ormond Building at RMIT, brings together experts from Australia and the United States to report and compare recent experiences in both countries. It will examine the capabilities of current AI systems, the dynamics of digital media platforms, and the institutional, technical and regulatory strategies that can protect elections now and in the future.
The workshop is a collaboration of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society and the University of Southern California’s Election Cybersecurity Initiative.
SPEAKERS

Mark Andrejevic
Mark Andrejevic is a Chief Investigator at the Monash University node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S). Mark Andrejevic is Professor of Media Studies in the School of Media, Film, and Journalism at Monash University. His research covers the social, political, and cultural impact of digital media, with a focus on surveillance and popular culture. He is the author of four monographs, including, most recently Automated Media, as well as more than 90 academic articles and book chapters. He is a member of the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society and heads up the Automated Society Working Group at Monash. Before coming to Monash he held positions at the University of Queensland and the University of Iowa.

Daniel Angus
Prof Daniel Angus is a Chief Investigator at the Queensland University of Technology node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S). Daniel is a Professor of Digital Communication in the School of Communication at QUT. His research focuses on the development of computational analysis methods for communication data, with a specific focus on interaction data. His novel computational methods have improved our understanding of the nature of communication in medical consultations, conversations in aged care settings, television broadcast, social media, and newspaper reporting.

Michelle Blom
Dr Michelle Blom is a Senior Research Fellow in the AI and Autonomy group of the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne. Dr Blom has diverse research interests that include election integrity (with a focus on post-election audits), combinatorial optimisation (with a focus on algorithms for solving large problems through decomposition, local search, and the use of mathematical programming), applications of reinforcement learning, and Explainable AI.

Ariel Bogle
Ariel is an investigations reporter at Guardian Australia with a focus on technology, extremism, and online culture. Previously, she was a technology reporter at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, where she contributed to programs across the network. She also served as technology editor at The Conversation and as associate editor with Future Tense—a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that explores how emerging technologies will change the way we live. Her reporting has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Australian Financial Review, Slate, and other outlets.

Casey Briggs
Casey Briggs is a journalist with ABC News, covering far north Queensland for television, radio and online. He was an editor of the University of Adelaide’s student paper On Dit and the training coordinator at community station Radio Adelaide. He has a Master degree in mathematics that he doesn’t use nearly enough, and a Twitter account he uses probably too much.

Jeffrey Cole
Jeffrey Cole has been at the forefront of media and communication technology issues both in the United States and internationally for the past three decades. An expert in the field of technology and emerging media, Cole serves as an adviser to governments and leading companies around the world as they craft digital strategies.
Cole founded and directs the World Internet Project, a long-term longitudinal look at the effects of computer and Internet technology, which is conducted in over 35 countries. At the announcement of the project in June 1999, Vice President Al Gore praised Cole as a “true visionary providing the public with information on how to understand the impact of media.”

Timothy Graham
Timothy Graham is Associate Professor in Digital Media at QUT. His research combines computational methods with social theory to study online networks and platforms, with a particular interest in online bots and trolls, disinformation, and online ratings and rankings devices.
He develops open source software tools for big data analysis, and has published in journals such as Information, Communication & Society, Information Polity, Big Data & Society, and Critical Social Policy.

Jung-hwa (Judy) Kang
Jung-hwa “Judy” Kang is a Special Project Manager at the University of Southern California’s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, where she oversees program development, research, and event management for initiatives based at USC’s Washington, D.C. campus. Her work includes the USC Election Cybersecurity Initiative, which has held workshops worldwide and in all 50 U.S. states, as well as the Africa-U.S. Initiative, the Democratic Resilience series, and high-level discussions with officials from the Department of Defense and prominent journalists. Kang also leads public diplomacy forums in partnership with Public Diplomacy of America, where she serves on the Board.

Christopher Leckie
Prof Chris Leckie is a Chief Investigator at the University of Melbourne node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S).
Chris is a Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne. Prof Leckie has a strong interest in developing AI techniques for a variety of applications in telecommunications, such as cyber security, network management, fault diagnosis and the Internet-of-Things.
He also has an interest in robust and scalable machine learning algorithms for problems such as clustering and anomaly detection, with a focus on adversarial machine learning.

Devi Mallal
Devi Mallal is a founding member of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s new Verification team, ABC NEWS Verify. Previously, she was the Media and Research Lead of RMIT ABC Fact Check, where she focused on introducing automated fact-checking technologies into the editorial team’s workflow for election monitoring sprints and facilitating the ADM+S affiliated Fact Check Research.
In the lead up to the 2022 Federal Election, Devi co-designed and directed the Mosaic Project, a misinformation detection and debunking sprint, in partnership with the Judith Neilson Institute for Ideas and global leaders in misinformation detection, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
In preparation for the Voice to Parliament referendum, Devi worked closely with the UK’s Full Fact to tailor their automated claim detection software Full Fact AI for the Australian context, in what was the software’s first Asia-Pacific trial.
She is currently designing an innovative misinformation monitoring project which ABC NEWS Verify hopes to deploy during the 2025 election campaign.

Dang Nguyen
Dang Nguyen is a Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society, located in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Dang holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and a Master of Science in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford, where she was a Chevening Scholar. She has been a Fox Fellow at Yale University and a Majority World Scholar at Yale Law School. Dang serves as a media and technology expert on the International Panel for the Information Environment (IPIE). Dang’s books include ‘Digital research methods and the diaspora’ (Routledge, 2023) and ‘Internet cures’ (Bristol University Press, 2024).

Adam Clayton Powell III
Adam Clayton Powell III is executive director of the USC initiative on election cybersecurity, which includes USC’s schools of business, engineering, law and public policy. With support from Google, this bipartisan initiative provides in-state training in all 50 U.S. states and at conferences in Africa, Asia and Europe, to reinforce election integrity and help build defence against digital attacks. Powell also directs Washington programs for the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy and hosts a weekly program on US public television. Previously, Powell was Manager of Political Coverage for CBS News, Vice President of news at National Public Radio, Director of a US National Science Foundation research center, and executive producer at Quincy Jones Entertainment.

Mark Sanderson
Prof Mark Sanderson is a Chief Investigator at the RMIT University node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S). Mark is a Professor of Information Retrieval at RMIT University (RMIT), Director of the ISE Enabling Capability Platform at RMIT and head of the RMIT Information Retrieval (IR) group.
He has raised over $11 million dollars in grant income, published over 150 papers, and approximately 10,000 citations to his work. His research is in the areas of search engines, recommender systems, user, data, and text analytics.

Damiano Spina
Dr Damiano Spina is an Associate Investigator at the RMIT University node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S). Damiano is a Senior Lecturer and DECRA Fellow at the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University.
His research areas are Information Retrieval and Text Analytics. In particular, his research focuses on Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) (including user-system interactions in voice-enabled intelligent assistants) and evaluation of information access systems (including effectiveness measures of search engines and fairness-aware evaluation).

Julian Thomas
Julian Thomas is Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S Centre).
Julian is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.
Prior to the commencement of the ADM+S Centre, he was Director of the Swinburne Institute for Social Research (2005-2016), and then Director of RMIT’s Social Change research platform. He also leads the team producing the Australian Digital Inclusion Index since 2015. His work ranges across the contemporary histories of new communications technologies, digital inequality and inclusion, and the internet and communication policy.
Julian was elected to the Council of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2017, is a Board member of the Australian Communications Consumers Action Network (ACCAN), and an Advisory Board member of Humanitech, an initiative of the Australian Red Cross.

Fan Yang
Dr Yang is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Melbourne node of ADM+S. Her work focuses on technologies and governance, digital ethics, innovative research methods, migration politics, and postcolonial technoscience. Her doctoral thesis, entitled ‘News Manufactories on WeChat’, provided one of the first insights into the internal operation of WeChat in Australia as a content production platform. She co-leads a project that maintains one of the biggest datasets from WeChat.
She has worked with international NGOs and think tanks as an external analyst. Her work has been translated into multiple languages including Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and French. Her research has been covered by Australian national and international media outlets.

Haiqing Yu
Haiqing is a Professor of Media and Communication and ARC Future Fellow (2021-2025) at RMIT University.
She is a critical media studies scholar with expertise on Chinese digital media, communication and culture and their sociopolitical and cultural impact in China, Australia and the Asia Pacific.
She is currently working on projects on China’s digital expansion and influence in Australasia, Chinese-language digital/social media in Australia, the social implications of China’s social credit system, and social studies of digital technologies in the Chinese context.