P. Takis Metaxas is a Professor and Chair of Wellesley's Computer Science department and a research scholar at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University (USA), and the Center for Technology and Global Affairs at Oxford University (UK).
His research on the propagation of misinformation online and the un-predictability of electoral results by social media has been extensively covered in the news and honored with several National Science Foundation grants and four “best paper” awards.
Takis' interest in the power of mathematics to discover "the truth" goes back several decades. His first paper on the topic entitled "Of course it's true, I saw it on the Internet" was published in 2003, followed by a 2005 paper entitled "Web Spam, Propaganda and Trust", the first Computer Science paper that was raising the issue of propaganda on the Web and pointing to the dangerous effects of manipulating search engine results.
In the 2010 paper entitled "From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-Time Search" they documented the first effort to use Social Media and bots to influence elections in the US. While this work received the Best Paper Award at WebScience 2010 and an NSF grant to develop "TwitterTrails", a tool for measuring rumor propagation on Twitter, lawmakers did not pay much attention.
Unfortunately, the disinformation and propagandistic techniques Takis and his team discovered and warned in "The fake news spreading plague: Was it preventable?" have been used successfully ever since. His current approach to solving the problem is described in a book chapter entitled "Technology, Propaganda, and the Limits of Human Intellect" published this year by MIT Press.
I was first introduced to Takis by my former student Lucas Kello when he was the Founding Director of the Centre for Technology and Global Affairs at Oxford and I had a non-resident research associate position. Takis was teaching there in the Trinity semester.
Takis is a passionate teacher and was Director of the Albright Institute at Wellesley from 2015-2019. We bonded over ideas and music, and our Institute’s had strikingly similar goals and objectives as Lucas well knew. And we bonded over our passionate love of Futbol. dedicated soccer player/coach/referee/fan.
I spent a wonderful year at his invitation at the Institute as their Inaugural Fellows Mentor in 2018-19 helping their wonderful students celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Institute. It was a privilege to help them prepare their presentations before, Ambassador Samantha Power, the Institute’s Scholar in Residence.