Francesca Spezzano is an Assistant Professor at Boise State University in the Computer Science department. Before that, she was Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. She received her Ph.D. from University of Calabria, Italy in 2012. While a Ph.D. student, she visited the Database Group at University of California Santa Cruz. Her research interests deal with identifying bad actors on social media, signed social networks, information diffusion, and national security.

Bad actors seriously compromise social media every day by threatening the safety of the users and the integrity of the content. This keynote speech will give an overview of the state of the art social network analysis, data mining, and machine learning techniques to detect bad actors in social media. More specifically, we will describe both general methods that are platform independent or valid for any malicious user, and methods specific to a particular social media (Twitter, Facebook, Slashdot, Wikipedia, Instagram) and/or a given type of bad actor (bots, spammers, trolls, vandals, cyberbullies). We will group these methods into four broad categories, namely (i) active methods, (ii) content-based, (iii) social network-based, and (iv) behaviorbased, and show their effectiveness in enforcing cybersafety.