SPRITE+ Lunch and Learn with Dr. Rahat Masood

Social bots have advanced into highly sophisticated actors within online ecosystems, shaping public discussion, spreading misinformation, and carrying out coordinated deceptive campaigns on an unprecedented scale.

Driven by the rising threat of covert and adaptable bot operations, this talk brings together three complementary investigations into the behaviour and detection of these entities:

• BotSSCL, a self-supervised contrastive learning framework that identifies highly human-like bots by leveraging social network-inspired contrastive objectives to enhance separability in the embedding space.
• TBTrackerX, which provides a measurement-based approach to trigger-based (TB) bot campaigns, automated agents that activate in response to specific keywords to partake in deceptive financial or illicit interactions.
• Capture the Narrative (CTN), a world-first competition developed at UNSW Sydney, transforms the challenge of misinformation and social bot influence into an interactive, data-driven learning experience.

Together, these investigations offer a comprehensive view of how advanced bots operate and how they can be countered, emphasising the urgent need for adaptive, resilient, and trustworthy detection strategies in today’s dynamic social media landscapes.

About Rahat

Dr. Rahat Masood is a Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney’s School of Computer Science and Engineering and Program Director for the UNSW Online Cyber Security program. She received her PhD in Privacy-Preserving Technologies from UNSW and CSIRO’s Data61 in 2020. Her research interests span inclusive privacy, misinformation and disinformation, social bots, social media manipulation, and behavioural biometrics.

Dr. Masood has authored and co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed conference and journal papers, including publications in top-tier venues such as WWW, NDSS, ASIACCS, TOPS, and PETS. She has an extensive track record of leading government-funded research projects supported by organisations such as the Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG), Department of Defence (DoD), Office of National Intelligence (ONI), auDA, the UNSW Australian Human Rights Institute, the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC), and the Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator (ASCA), among others. Since joining UNSW in 2020, she has secured over $5 million in external research funding, including nearly $3 million in the past two years.

About SPRITE+

SPRITE+ is the EPSRC funded Security, Privacy, Identity, Trust, Engagement NetworkPlus. We bring together people involved in research, practice, and policy with a focus on digital contexts.

SPRITE+ Lunch and Learn is your chance to find out the latest developments in the world of Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security (TIPS). Join us every third Wednesday of the month at 1:00pm (GMT) for a lightning 20 minute talk from an Industry or Academic expert followed by 10 minutes of Q&A.

Visit our YouTube channel to access recording of previous Lunch + Learn talks.

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