iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 28/07/2026

At the University of Vermont for IC2S2, where I will co-host a tutorial on detecting influence campaigns on social media this afternoon. Say hi if you are here! ic2s2-2026.org/program/

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Knight First Amendment Institute @knightcolumbia.org · 14/07/2026

Breaking: A federal court has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from enforcing an immigration policy targeting noncitizen researchers, advocates, fact-checkers, and trust and safety workers based on their work. knightcolumbia.org/content/fede...

knightcolumbia.org

Federal Court Suspends Trump Immigration Policy Targeting Technology Researchers

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Jeremy Menchik @menchik.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Syllabus fodder! Our book is out NOW and open access for 2 weeks. Download it and take your pick of any of my FIVE amazing coauthors to lecture in your comparative politics, American politics, social movement, research methods, or digital politics syllabus. doi.org/10.1017/9781...

doi.org

Protests and Radicalization in the Digital Age

Cambridge Core - Political Sociology - Protests and Radicalization in the Digital Age

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 01/06/2026

As in, the little amount of research that is still possible will focus on public feeds, while the real "action" is happening elsewhere?

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 01/06/2026

This is an interesting point, and I agree that much social interactions likely moved to DMs/stories etc. - too bad that social media researchers at the moment are struggling to get access to public APIs, these other channels are just out of reach... I wonder how this will affect the field?

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 15/05/2026

Entire conference with over a thousand submissions. I flagged suspicious papers for ACs/reviewers to check futher

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 15/05/2026

Sadly not all publishers issue DOIs (in computer science at least), and querying 10s of thousands of citations automatically is prone to errors/rate limiting (I queried over 60k last week alone, it took a while).

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 15/05/2026

Not sure, I'm involved with the 2027 edition with a conference and the DOIs for the 2026 edition aren't active yet. We have been working on a checking tool that is as comprehensive as possible, but there's still a lot of work to be done: github.com/gianlucasb/h...

github.com

GitHub - gianlucasb/hallucinator: A tool to detect potentially hallucinated or fabricated references in academic PDF papers.

A tool to detect potentially hallucinated or fabricated references in academic PDF papers. - gianlucasb/hallucinator

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 15/05/2026

In fast pacing fields like computer science, AI etc. DOIs don't get published fast enough... In our hallucination detection tool we query more than 10 bibliographic databases, but the whole thing is just a mess...

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Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 15/05/2026

NeurIPS allowed the authors of papers with hallucinated reference to just fix them. The problem is that some claims made about those incorrect references were likely also AI generated, are potentially incorrect, and are still in the papers. We definitely need a stronger stance throughout CS academia

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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

ArXiV has a new LLM policy (Screenshots with alt text so you don’t have to click through to the other place and see all the stupid responses)

Attention @arxiv authors: Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. 1/

If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). 2/

We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can't trust anything in the paper. 3/

The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue. 4/

Examples of incontrovertible evidence: hallucinated references, meta-comments from the LLM ("here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?"; "the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments") end/

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 15/05/2026

I like this. If the paper contains hallucinated references, how can we trust anything else in it? By the way, I'll present our experience developing and using the hallucinator tool next week at MetaCrisp (co-located with IEEE S&P)! 📄 seclab.bu.edu/people/gianl... 💾 github.com/gianlucasb/h...

seclab.bu.edu

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 01/05/2026

No, it's designed to be used during peer review. Papers stay local to preserve confidentiality, only bibliographic information about the references is sent to remote parties

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 01/05/2026

Try the binaries. You may have to set up API keys if you want to do online lookups, there is also functionality to build offline DBLP arxiv etc. databases

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Alessandro Rigolon @alerigolon.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

My university administrators censored a student who put “environmental justice” and “communities disproportionately affected by climate change” on an Earth Day flyer. I really have no words to express my anger and disappointment anymore

sltrib.com

In rare move, University of Utah faculty say school leaders should apologize to student over Earth Day flyers

The student was told to remove phrases including “environmental justice” from the flyers.

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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 27/04/2026

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

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Zion Leonahenahe Basque @mahal0z.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

This Fall, I’m joining the University of Georgia as an Assistant Professor! I want to push on the fundamentals of software reverse engineering, from decompilation to how humans actually understand code. I’m looking for PhD students, collaborators, and sponsors. More below.

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Harry Turtledove @hntdove.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

The US and Canada go to Daylight Savings Time tomorrow morning.

The meme with a guy and two girls. The guy is labeled 1:59 AM. His girlfriend islabeled 2 AM. The cute girl coming the other way is labeled 3AM.

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 26/02/2026

Our paper "Loki: Proactively discovering online scams by mining toxic search queries" won a Distinguished Paper Award at NDSS 2026! 📜 arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12181

arxiv.org

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 23/02/2026

Together with @mrjimmyblack.com (and Claude) we developed a tool that helps detecting hallucinated references in academic papers! This evolved from a simple python script into a full system written in Rust to quickly go through thousands of citations. Check it out! github.com/gianlucasb/h...

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 23/02/2026

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 22/02/2026

Welcome! MA professor here who’s research funding has been almost entirely terminated by the admin

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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

“If America’s university presidents believe that their foremost responsibility is simply to keep their institutions operational — collecting tuition and protecting endowments — they are mistaken… presidents and chancellors are stewards of intellectual freedom and democratic norms.”

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strufe @strufe.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

💥The year starts with great news:💥 🍾Àlex' paper accepted at USENIX Sec🎉 He demonstrates how suppression (and: sampling as one special case) may amplify privacy but yields disproportionate utility loss. It's been hard work: 🚀per aspera ad astra🌟 Congrats, we're proud! arxiv.org/abs/2601.05180

Screenshot of the title page of Alex' paper - "The Adverse Effects of Omitting Records in Differential Privacy: How Sampling and Suppression Degrade the Privacy–Utility Tradeoff"

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 24/01/2026

The way I interpret this, is that this is finally the year of Linux on the desktop

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 23/01/2026

Great work! I wanted to write a paper on civitai but never got to it. Great to see that someone did!

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Matt DeVerna @matthewdeverna.com · 23/01/2026

🚨 New working paper 🚨 What happens when you add money + competition to generative AI creation? On Civitai—a prominent platform for gen-AI content/tools w. millions of users—you get a growing marketplace for NSFW requests and a nontrivial stream of deepfakes. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2601.09117 🧪

$Four-panel figure showing Civitai bounty statistics. Panel (a) shows a horizontal bar chart of bounty counts by type, with LoRA having the most bounties at 2,984, followed by Image at 1,475, Model at 138, and decreasing to Video at 35. Panel (b) displays a horizontal bar chart of bounty themes by proportion, with NSFW being the largest category at approximately 0.43 (comprising 2,286 bounties split between platform-labeled and GPT-4.1 classified NSFW shown with diagonal hatching), followed by Fictional Characters at 1,463 bounties. Panel (c) presents stacked horizontal bars showing NSFW versus SFW proportions for each bounty type, with Video being 69\% NSFW and Embed being 82\% SFW. Panel (d) shows a time series from November 2023 to January 2025 displaying the proportion of SFW (decreasing trend line) and NSFW (increasing trend line) bounties over time, with 95\% confidence intervals shown as shaded regions around each trend line and vertical dashed lines marking the start of 2024 and 2025.$ $Two-panel figure analyzing deepfake bounties on Civitai. Panel (a) shows gender distribution split into two horizontal bar charts. The top chart displays NSFW deepfake bounties with Female at 95.8\% and Male at 4.2\%. The bottom chart shows SFW deepfake bounties with Female at 89.6\%, Male at 10.1\%, and Non-binary at 0.3\%. Panel (b) presents a stacked horizontal bar chart showing the profession distribution across all deepfakes, with bars color-coded for NSFW (red) and SFW (blue) categories. Actor/actress leads at 39.3\% of deepfakes, followed by Influencer at 13.9\%, Adult worker at 13.0\%, Artist at 10.2\%, Miscellaneous at 8.4\%, Model at 7.4\%, Athlete at 5.3\%, Self/spouse at 1.2\%, Reporter at 0.9\%, and Producer at 0.3\%. The x-axis shows the number of bounties ranging from 0 to 140.$

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Pam Herd @pamherd.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Universities, companies, and government agencies that continue to operate on X, now that this is clearly documented (majority of content included sexualized images of women and children) are actively supporting "industrial-scale abuse." Paid subscribers can still do this.

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Brendan Cantwell @cantb.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

1/ Thoughts on the state of federal higher ed policy: Showing the limits of Trump’s power, he asked Congress to gut research funding, cut access programs, and end support for MSIs. Congress said no. But … the government will need to stay open and Trump will have to approve the funding packages.

insidehighered.com

Congress Proposes Increasing NIH Budget, Maintaining ED

Appropriators have released legislation that wouldn’t defund Education Department programs or slash the National Institutes of Health budget. And it would prohibit the federal government from capping ...

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ISI Foundation @isi.it · 19/01/2026

⏰ Less than two weeks left to apply! @isi.it & CRT Foundation offer 10 one-year scholarships in data science & AI, applied to: 🩺 public health · 🌍 humanitarian response · 🏙️ urban development · ♻️ sustainability 📅 Deadline: Feb 2, 2026 🔗 Details here: sites.google.com/view/lagrang...

sites.google.com

Lagrange Fellowship Call

The Lagrange Project started in 2003 and it is regarded as one of the pioneering and most innovative European projects on complex systems science and data science. It is promoted and funded by Fondazi...

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 08/01/2026

And after being praised for it, "glowing and laughing about it"

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Eerke Boiten @eerkeboiten.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

Senior academic roles in Cyber Security at De Montfort University Leicester (ACE-CSE Gold; 20+ academics in cyber; great facilities; research links with AI and with social responsibility), professor and associate professor. Closing 18 Jan.

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Ken Childs @thekenchilds.com · 02/01/2026

Folks, she brought a whole plate of spaghetti to the broadcast center to do her headshot. She then houses that spaghetti. Mattia sips on an espresso during his. Truly the heroes we need during these times.

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 02/01/2026

My daily audience while writing grant proposals

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Matthew Green @matthewdgreen.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

The fun thing about watching the movie 2001 in 2025 is you realize HAL is just an LLM and so *obviously* it’s going to murder its crewmembers every few flights due to malformed JSON.

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danielequercia.bsky.social @danielequercia.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

PhD students in AI: Bell Labs Cambridge is hiring Summer 2026 interns in Social & #ResponsibleAI. Paid, 3 months, visa support, publication-focused. Work on AI ethics, risk, governance, and human values. Deadline: Jan 11, 2026.

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 10/12/2025

The 2025 @acsacconf.bsky.social is ready to start! Looking forward to three days of papers and discussions. Come say hi if you are around!

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 04/12/2025

Is the memo available anywhere? This looks like a very broad set of topics, "online safety" can mean anything really

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Gianluca Stringhini @gianlucastringhini.com · 21/11/2025

Our paper "The Cost of Convenience: Identifying, Analyzing, and Mitigating Predatory Loan Applications on Android" was accepted at ASIACCS 2026! Work led by my student Olawale Akanji. Stay tuned for the PDF!

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Alan Jagolinzer @jagolinzer.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

When people falsely claim that we are doing censorship work, I think, in many cases, what they are trying to do is stop us from trying to understand the harms they are trying to push...using bad information. m.youtube.com/watch?v=kFoO...

m.youtube.com

University of Cambridge Prof Jagolinzer on the need to understand the harms from disinformation

YouTube video by Cambridge Disinformation Summit

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