[Air-L] CCDS Presents Ryan Scrivens, March 18th at Noon

[Jeff Hemsley]

The Center for Computational and Data Sciences presents Dr. Ryan Scrivens, Friday, March 18th 12:00-1:00 PM EST, titled Examining Right-Wing Extremist Posting Behaviors Online with Machine Learning.

This talk is free and open to the public. Please do register for the event using the link below and feel free to forward:

https://forms.gle/wvZMTCpTZjYYsHsLA



Examining Right-Wing Extremist Posting Behaviors Online with Machine Learning

Despite the ongoing need for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to develop advanced information technologies, machine learning algorithms, and risk assessment tools to identify and assess the online activities of violent right-wing extremists prior to their engagement in violence offline, little is empirically known about their online behaviors generally or differences in their posting behaviors compared to non-violent extremists who share similar ideological beliefs particularly. In this presentation, Ryan Scrivens will discuss his empirical research on right-wing extremist posting behaviors and highlight various machine learning techniques to identify behaviors that may inform future risk factor frameworks used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies to identify credible threats online. He will also discuss a novel and unique strategy that he has used to collect online content from violent and non-violent right-wing extremists for large-scale data analyses. He will conclude with a discussion of future trends in examining right-wing extremist posting behaviors with machine learning.

Ryan Scrivens is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. He is also an Associate Director at the International CyberCrime Research Centre at Simon Fraser University in Canada and a Research Fellow at the VOX-Pol Network of Excellence in Ireland. Ryan conducts problem-oriented interdisciplinary research with a focus on terrorists' and extremists' use of the Internet, right-wing terrorism and extremism, and hate crime. Many of his research projects are derived from his engagements with front-line practitioners in law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as well as in social media and tech companies. A hallmark of his research is employing advanced quantitative methods and machine learning tools to better understand right-wing extremists' use of the Internet and associated technologies. He complements this approach by also conducting in-depth interviews with current and former violent extremists, as well as law enforcement and community activists. As a result, he has become a leading international expert on right-wing terrorism and extremism, known among his peers for conducting innovate and cutting-edge empirical research. Ryan has published over 40 peer-reviewed journal articles, books and book chapters, conference proceedings, and policy notes in the past five years. His recent work appears in Terrorism and Political Violence, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, New Media & Society, and Deviant Behavior. He also has book contracts with Oxford University Press and Palgrave. Ryan has presented his findings before practitioners and policymakers at the UK Home Office in London, the Department of Defence in Ottawa, the Swedish Defence Research Agency in Stockholm, and the United Nations in New York and in Vienna.