In this episode we talk with Manita Pote, a PhD student at Indiana University Bloomington, specializing in online trust and safety, with a focus on detecting coordinated manipulation campaigns on social media. 

Key insights include how coordinated reply attacks target influential figures like journalists and politicians, how machine learning models can detect these inauthentic campaigns using structural and behavioral features, and how deletion patterns reveal efforts to evade moderation or manipulate engagement metrics.

Follow our guest

X/Twitter
Google Scholar

Papers in focus
Coordinated Reply Attacks in Influence Operations: Characterization and Detection ,2025
Manipulating Twitter through Deletions,2022

Kyle discusses the history and proof for the small world hypothesis.

Kyle asks Asaf questions about the new network science course he is now teaching.  The conversation delves into topics such as contact tracing, tools for analyzing networks, example use cases, and the importance of thinking in networks.

In this episode we talk with Bavo DC Campo, a data scientist and statistician, who shares his expertise on the intersection of actuarial science, fraud detection, and social network analytics.

Together we will learn how to use graphs to fight against insurance fraud by uncovering hidden connections between fraudulent claims and bad actors.

Key insights include how social network analytics can detect fraud rings by mapping relationships between policyholders, claims, and service providers, and how the BiRank algorithm, inspired by Google’s PageRank, helps rank suspicious claims based on network structure.

Bavo will also present his iFraud simulator that can be used to model fraudulent networks for detection training purposes.

Do you have a question about fraud detection? Bavo says he will gladly help. Feel free to contact him.  

-------------------------------

Want to listen ad-free?  Try our Graphs Course?  Join Data Skeptic+ for $5 / month of $50 / year

https://plus.dataskeptic.com