Safeguarding Fair Elections: Experts convene to address emerging threats of AI
Author ADM+S Centre
Date 19 November 2024
In an era marked by 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? What actions should citizens, journalists, policymakers, researchers, and politicians take to safeguard the integrity of our elections?
To address these challenges, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making has partnered with the University of Southern California’s (USC) Election Cybersecurity Initiative to convene a one-day workshop. This event will bring together leading experts from Australia and the United States to share insights and compare recent experiences in tackling election security threats in both countries.
Professor Daniel Angus, Director of the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT and Chief Investigator at ADM+S will be speaking at the event, emphasising that safeguarding elections is foundational for democracy.
“Safeguarding fair elections is vital for democracy; it requires a collaborative effort that draws on the insights of diverse stakeholders and internal experts. By bringing together a wide range of voices—researchers, industry leaders, and policymakers—we can create a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and develop effective, actionable strategies.
“When we protect the vote we are protecting the collective voice of the people. While emerging technologies challenge election security in new ways, it is also essential that we recognise and address underlying social factors as well. With insights from a range of fields we are far better placed to tackle the human and technological sides of election security, and protect the integrity of our democratic institutions,” said Professor Angus.
Speakers include Adam Clayton Powell III, Executive Director of the USC Initiative on Election Cybersecurity; Jeffrey Cole, Director of the Centre for the Digital Future; ABC’s US elections analyst Casey Briggs; as well as ADM+S researchers in the field.
Together, they will investigate the capabilities of current AI systems, the dynamics of digital media platforms, and the institutional, technical, and regulatory strategies necessary to protect elections now and in the future.
The ADM+S and USC invites Government (policy makers), industry (electoral officials/workers, regulatory), and journalists (political/election and AI focus) as well as interested general public to attend this workshop to engage in this crucial dialogue.
Alongside researchers from the ADM+S Centre: Prof Mark Andrejevic, Prof Daniel Angus, Assoc Prof Timothy Graham, Prof Christopher Leckie, Dang Nguyen, Prof Mark Sanderson, Distinguished Prof Julian Thomas, Fan Yang, and Prof Haiqing Yu.
Speakers include:
Dr Michelle Blom – 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.
Casey Briggs – Data journalist and presenter with ABC News, and the ABC’s US Elections Analyst. He covers elections in Australia and around the world. His series ‘America, Are You OK?’ examined how US voters were feeling about their own democracy in the leadup to the presidential election. He is also a partner in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society within the Australian Ad Observatory.
Jeffrey Cole – 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. 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.
Jung-hwa (Judy) Kang – 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.
Devi Mallal – Founding member and the Media and Research Lead at RMIT ABC Fact Check. In the lead up to the 2022 Federal Election, Devi co-directed the Mosaic Project, a collaboration between RMIT FactLab, the Judith Neilson Institute for Ideas and Global leaders in misinformation detection, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
Adam Clayton Powell III – Executive Director of the USC initiative on election cybersecurity, in association with USC’s schools of business, engineering, law and public policy and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. With support from Google, this bipartisan initiative provides in-state training in all 50 states to reinforce election integrity and build defence against digital attacks.
For further information and registration visit Are Fair Elections Possible In The Age Of AI?
