"Antisemitism in the Age of AI: Trends, Challenges, and Research Frontiers"

August 31, 2025. In this episode, Nathalie Japkowicz, Yfat Barak-Cheney, and Julie Ancis discuss, "Antisemitism in the Age of AI: Trends, Challenges, and Research Frontiers," for the 2025 Datathon and Machine Learning Competition on Antisemitism Detection.

Nathalie Japkowicz is a professor in the Computer Science Department at American University, which she chaired from July 2018 to June 2024. Prior to that, she directed the Laboratory for Research on Machine Learning applied to Defense and Security at the University of Ottawa in Canada. She is a Professor and AI/Machine Learning researcher particularly interested in lifelong machine learning, anomaly detection, hate speech monitoring, machine learning evaluation, and the handling of uncharacteristic data including datasets plagued by class imbalances. Her publications include Evaluating Learning Algorithms: A Classification Perspective at Cambridge University Press (2011), an edited book in the Springer Series on Big Data (2016), and her recent co-authored book entitled Machine Learning Evaluation: Towards Reliable and Responsible AI at Cambridge University Press, which appeared in November 2024.

Yfat Barak-Cheney is the Director of International Affairs and the Executive Director of WJC's Technology and Human Rights Institute. Yfat earned an LL.M in International Legal Studies from New York University where she was a Transitional Justice Scholar and an International Law and Human Rights Fellow. She also holds an LL.M (with honors) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also received her L.L.B and a B.A in International Relations, receiving an award for outstanding international law student. She previously worked with the Ministry of Justice Unit for Combating Human Trafficking and in several NGO’s. Yfat is a co-founder of ALMA – Association for the Promotion of International Humanitarian Law in Israel. She is a member of the New York Bar and the Israeli Bar Association.

Julie Ancis is a Distinguished Professor and former Interim Chair in the Department of Informatics and Founding Director of the Cyberpsychology Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Dr. Ancis’ extensive scholarly publications include 4 books, over 80 journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports, and over 200 professional presentations focused on diversity, multicultural competence, the legal system, and human-computer interaction. Her extensive literature review, "Cyberpsychological Investigations of Social Media and Online Antisemitism: The Scholarly Landscape," has just been published in the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism.

Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/