Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1:  An example of a Coyote ad on social media in Spanish. (Figure 1 in  Kodandaram et al. )   Introduction Social media has revolutionized how information flows, connecting people across the globe at an unprecedented scale. However, this same connectivity has made these platforms fertile ground for illicit activities, including human smuggling. This issue, though not immediately visible to most people, poses a severe humanitarian crisis. We explore in our paper published at the 35th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media 2024 titled " Unveiling Coyote Ads: Detecting Human Smuggling Advertisements on Social Media, " how traffickers exploit these platforms to lure vulnerable individuals, particularly those seeking better opportunities or fleeing dangerous situations. The study focuses on identifying and analyzing “ coyote ads, ” which are advertisements posted by human smugglers. Our goal was clear: to develop an effective detection mechanism that exposes thes...

Recently, OpenAI launched ChatGPT , an extremely powerful language model chatbot that can answer complex questions in a conversational manner. It has become the talk of the town since its release. ChatGPT is everywhere! The New York Times reported that Google's existence could be threatened by ChatGPT for its playfulness and efficiency to give direct answers to any question. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2022/12/28/what-does-chatgpt-really-mean-for-businesses/?sh=407c5fa87d1e GPT is a large transformer-based language model developed by OpenAI that has been trained on a diverse dataset of texts, including books, articles, and websites, in order to learn the structure and style of natural language. It has achieved state-of-the-art performance on a number of natural language processing tasks, including language translation, language generation, and text summarization. ChatGPT was fine-tuned on top of GPT-3.5 using supervised learning as well as reinforcement lea...