In the seventh installment of the Science & Technology Studies Seminar Series at York, University of Waterloo Professor John McLevey will present “Democracies in Crisis? Online Deception, Disinformation, and Political Polarization in Comparative Perspective.”

The event runs Dec. 3, and is the final event for the 2019 year. It takes place in Bethune College Room 203 from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. The event is free to attend.

In 2016, the American election and the U.K. referendum to leave the EU opened up a new set of questions about the role of social media in changing the distribution of information and news, in creating online echo chambers, and enabling new types of coordinated disinformation campaigns that manipulate public discourse, amplify extremist political views, and undermine democratic governance.

In the first part of this talk, McLevey will compare two network-based disinformation tactics that likely have micro-level effects on the formation of political beliefs and behaviours, and macro-level effects on political polarization. He will then draw on social network analysis, natural language processing, and automated deception detection research to propose a methodological strategy for studying these tactics at scale, and to better understanding their micro- and macro-level effects.

McLevey is an associate professor in the Department of Knowledge Integration at University of Waterloo, and is cross-appointed to Sociology & Legal Studies, the School of Environment, Resources & Sustainability (SERS), and Geography & Environmental Management (GEM). He is also a policy fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and a member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at the University of Waterloo.

His work focuses in on the areas of social network analysis and computational social science, with substantive interests in: science, technology, and democracy; and environmental governance and social movements.

On Nov. 7, the Faculty of Science hosted a learning and networking event dubbed “Science Unplugged” for its researchers, staff and students.

Science Unplugged is an event series that features diverse and quirky presentations by members of the Faculty. Held at the Convention Centre in the Second Student Centre, the event attracted some 60 attendees.

Faculty of Science Dean Esaias Janse van Rensburg kicked off the event with a welcome and introduction of Science Communicator in Residence B.D. Colen, who headlined the event with a talk about his coverage of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Colen spoke about the importance of listening to and considering different scientific perspectives when covering a topic.

Colen also served as the event’s master of ceremonies, introducing the remaining line-up of speakers: biology Professor Sandra Rehan, physics and astronomy Professor Eric Hessels and astronomy student Sunna Withers.

In a presentation titled “The Bees’ Needs: Diversity, Decline and Sustainability,” Rehan spoke about her current research projects on wild bees. Rehan’s work focuses on sustaining native bee populations through a combination of landscape ecology and comparative genomic and sociodemographic approaches.

Hessels presented “How Big is a Proton?,” summarizing his team’s precise measurement of the radius of a proton. The measurement, which published in Science earlier this year, took eight years to make and solved a decade-old puzzle.

Withers explained how she uses the new one-metre telescope at the Allan I. Carswell Observatory to take stunning images of the night sky in a presentation titled “From Planets to Galaxies: Observing the Universe.”

After the presentations, everyone had the opportunity to mix and mingle over refreshments.

The second instalment of a four-part seminar series will investigate the relationship between building models of brains and building computational systems.

Titled “The Biological Imitation Game; Or the sublime similarity of brain simulation,” the seminar will be held Nov. 8 from 12 to 2 p.m. as part of the Neurological Imaginaries Seminar Series, co-hosted by York University’s Neuroscience and Science & Technology Studies graduate programs.

Tara Mahfoud will present this talk based on her paper of the same name. In it, she explores how the history of building models of brains is intertwined with the history of building computational systems – from Alan Turing’s thinking machines to cybernetic brains and, more recently, the use of experimental and theoretical neuroscience in the development of Google DeepMind’s AI techniques.

Mahfoud’s paper states that many in the social studies of science have argued that the rise of computational approaches in the neurosciences – as evidenced by investments into big neuroscience projects in the EU, the U.S., Japan, Korea and Australia – may not only change neuroscientific practices, but also modify computational metaphors of brain and mind. She asks, “How are neuroscientists building models of brains? How do they assess how well they have reproduced the individual neurons they are reconstructing in silico and the behaviour of neural networks they are simulating?”

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a computational neuroscience laboratory in Switzerland between 2014 and 2015, Mahfoud demonstrates the centrality of vision to debates about the validity of brain simulations. Neuroscientists’ successful simulation of excitable neurons is sublime – it frightens them as much as it excites them. But, in reproducing nerve cells, they highlight the limits of machine vision and machine intelligence. In these laboratories, the brain is re-inscribed, over and over again, as a computational machine – but one that is very different to the machines they seek to build.

Mahfoud is a research associate in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London. She is an anthropologist of science, technology and medicine interested in the cultural, social, political, and clinical contexts and implications of developments in the neurosciences in Europe.

The Neurological Imaginaries Seminar Series brings neuroscientists, anthropologists and artists together in an interdisciplinary conversation to discuss epistemological tensions within traumatic brain injury care (supported with a Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant). These conversations, papers and installations explore how sensorial and arts-based methodologies might open up possibilities for understanding often imperceptible inner transformations that escape both biomedical technologies and language.

The Nov. 8 seminar will be followed by a live interview and a Q-and-A period. Light refreshments will be provided. It takes place in York Lanes 280N. All are welcome.

For more information, contact Jordan Hodgins at hodginsj@yorku.ca.