Event Details
In recent years, powerful artificial intelligence tools have made it possible to generate images, videos, and voices that look and sound strikingly real—but are, in fact, completely fabricated. These creations, known as deepfakes, have the power to entertain and educate, but they also carry serious risks. From fake political speeches to scams that use cloned voices of loved ones, deepfakes can blur the line between truth and fiction in ways that affect our daily lives.
This talk will give an accessible overview of how deepfakes are made, why they are so convincing, and the potential dangers they pose to individuals and society. We will also explore the cutting-edge technologies being developed to fight back—tools that help journalists, law enforcement, and everyday people verify what’s real and what’s fake.
By the end, you’ll have a clearer sense of how deepfakes work, why they matter, and what we can do together to protect truth in the digital age.
Presenter
Siwei Lyu- Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Information Integrity (CII), University at Buffalo
Siwei Lyu is a SUNY Distinguished Professor and a SUNY Empire Innovation Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the Director of the University at Buffalo Media Forensic Lab (UB MDFL), and the founding Co-Director of the Center for Information Integrity (CII) at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA.
Before joining UB, Dr. Lyu served as an Assistant Professor (2008-2014), tenured Associate Professor (2014-2019), and Full Professor (2019-2020) at the Department of Computer Science at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the Founding Director of UAlbany’s Computer Vision and Machine Learning Lab (CVML). From 2005 to 2008, he worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Center for Neural Science at New York University. In 2001, he was an Assistant Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. Dr. Lyu earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Dartmouth College in 2005 and both his M.S. (2000) and B.S. (1997) degrees in Computer Science and Information Science, respectively, from Peking University, China.
Dr. Lyu’s research interests include media forensics, computer vision, and machine learning. He has published over 240 refereed journal and conference papers. His research projects are funded by NSF, DARPA, and the US Department of Homeland Security. Dr. Lyu has received numerous awards, such as the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award (2011), the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2010), SUNY Albany’s Presidential Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Activities (2017), SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Activities (2018), Google Faculty Research Award (2019), and IEEE Region 1 Technological Innovation (Academic) Award (2021).
Dr. Lyu has served on the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee and held editorial positions with several prestigious journals. Dr. Lyu holds prestigious memberships and distinctions, including being a Fellow of IEEE, IAPR, and AAIA. He is also a Distinguished Member of ACM, a Senior Member of the Sigma Xi Society, and a Member of the Omicron Delta Kappa society.
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