Event Details

Join us on Wednesday 10th December in Sky Lounge for an end of year-round up from DSI. Prof Chris Nemeth, DSI Co-Director, will present an overview of this year’s DSI activities and award this year’s DSI prizes (see https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/dsi/ for details). Mince pies and mulled wine plus a game of Claire Hardaker’s, ‘Bot or Not’ will be on offer.

In 2024, a Hong Kong employee of a London-based multinational joined a video-call with the Global Chief Financial Officer and several others from the London HQ. Under direct instructions from this leadership team, the employee made a series of bank transfers totalling nearly £20m. If you want to know the perhaps unsurprising fate of that money, you’ll have to come to the talk. In it, you’ll be introduced to the fields of forensic linguistics (analysis of the linguistic content) and forensic speech science (analysis of the speech signal). And because it’s Christmas there will of course be a trivia quiz. Would you know if you were being called by your doting aunt or a digital agent? Are those real five-star reviews? Is that Billie Eilish on the radio… or Billie AI-lish? (Not sorry.) In short, can you identify the AI-generated texts, voices, and even music from the real deal? Finally, I’ll talk about the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and most especially, the future of AI-powered crime.

Claire Hardaker is a Professor of Forensic Linguistics, specialising in deceptive and manipulative language. She is based in the Linguistics & English Language department at Lancaster University, and directs FACTOR (Forensic Linguistics, Cybersecurity, and Technology Research).

Please let us know if you would like to join us dsi@lancaster.ac.uk thank you!