School of Social and Political Science

Description

Intro/ Why it matters

The digital environment is a critical site of real-world impact: a place where information manipulation threatens democratic processes, where AI systems carry their own emerging vulnerabilities, and where public perception and behaviour around policy and social issues are shaped and shifted at scale. Making sense of this requires both innovative tooling that can keep pace with the ever-evolving digital environment, as well as interdisciplinary knowledge of the vast social and technical domains it intersects with. In this session, CASM will give a practical presentation on how we build tools and methods to understand, and tap into, the ever-changing digital landscape, and on the interdisciplinary partners we work with to understand how it intersects with the critical social and political issues of our time.

Who we are and what we do

CASM Technology is a UK-based information integrity and digital analysis lab. We build tools and methods for interdisciplinary partners to monitor and understand information threats, online harms, and public sentiment and behaviour around critical social and policy issues. Our work spans multimodal data collection — including text, audio, video, advertising ecosystems and LLM chatbots — feeding into analysis that ranges from mapping narratives and coordinated behaviour, to detecting online harms and tracking platform enforcement, to monitoring emerging threats to AI systems themselves. We build semantic mapping and theme discovery tools that surface how issues and narratives evolve at scale; entity and network mapping that reveals relationships and influence pathways; validated AI classification across text, image, and audio; and LLM monitoring and auditing workflows for understanding model behaviour, including harmful or manipulated outputs.

Who it's for

This session will be most relevant to anyone working at the intersection of these areas. We'd particularly welcome colleagues from political science and international relations, media and communications, sociology, science and technology studies, and informatics, as well as anyone working on the societal impacts of AI more broadly. We're keen to hear about related work in the room and to explore where our tools, data, or methods might support new research, partnerships, or other opportunities.

Please register on Eventbrite, see ticketing link below.

CASM are a partner on the UKRI-funded Edinburgh-based WARSHARE project: https://warshare.ed.ac.uk)

CASM CASM Technology