iSchool Associate Professor Dr. Shuyuan Mary Ho Metcalfe was recently granted a Council on Research and Creativity (CRC) SEED grant from FSU.
FSU’s Seed Grant program provides funding for a new direction or continuing early support of existing research or creative activity, with the expectation that this assistance will lead to the application for external funding or support within one year of the completion of this award.
Metcalfe’s research focuses on generating multimodal data sources to substantiate and construct theoretical claims in how information is manipulated. The study aims to identify deepfake information behavior in terms of linguistic features and clues that are endemic to artificially generated language. In addition, the study will help detect multimodal deepfakes by constructing a multimodal data fusion.
This is an interdisciplinary research team with Metcalfe leading the information team, along with computational linguistics led by Dr. Thomas Juzek (FSU Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics) and machine learning/pattern recognition led by Dr. Shayok Chakraborty (FSU Department of Computer Science).
“I hope to continue to develop this work for the enhancement of societal cyber defense capabilities,” Metcalfe said. “The 21st century digital citizen needs to be equipped with basic information literacy and critical thinking skills so they can mitigate unintended consequences and unexpected cyber threats.”
Shuyuan went on to explain that as technology becomes more advanced, so comes the increase of digital media fabrications to manipulate reality. Textual, graphical, visual, and auditory information can be modified for entertainment purposes, or for spreading misinformation. Information can also be manipulated for more deceptive purposes resulting in disinformation which can lead to impersonation, fraud, blackmail and the spread of propaganda for political manipulation.
“As we address cybersecurity, which often refers to hackers attacking systems, network and data, we should also focus on protecting society from deepfake manipulation that seeks to misrepresent truth to attack institutions and individuals,” Metcalfe said.