Reza Zafarani

Associate Professor,
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
Syracuse University
Director, Data Lab

Data Lab


  • Fall 2025

    Welcome to Weibin Cai who is joining our group as a new PhD student!

  • Sep 2025

    Our paper "Analyzing Memory Effects in Large Language Models through the lens of Cognitive Psychology" is now available on arXiv.

  • Jul 2025

    Our paper "Is Less Really More? Fake News Detection with Limited Information" has been published in SIGKDD Explorations.

  • May 2025

    Congratulations to Jiayu Li for receiving the All University Doctoral Prize at Syracuse University!

  • May 2025

    Congratulations to Weibin Cai for successfully defending his MS thesis on harnessing LLMs to detect hate speech. Weibin will be continuing as a PhD student at Syracuse University!

  • Apr 2025

    I gave an invited talk "Fake news detection: Limited Ground Truth Limited Text No Understanding of Spreading Intent" at the GCI Seminar Series at Rochester Institute of Technology.

  • Mar 20, 2025

    I have received the WSDM 2025 Test of Time Award for our paper "Sarcasm Detection on Twitter: A Behavioral Modeling Approach" (WSDM 2015). The award was presented at WSDM 2025 in Hanover, Germany.

  • 2025

    I am serving as PC Co-Chair for CogMI 2025 (International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence) and PC Co-Chair (Research Track) for DSAA 2025.

  • 2025

    I have joined the editorial board of ACM AI Letters (AILet) as an Associate Editor.

  • Fall 2024

    Congratulations to Jiayu Li, Reyhaneh Abdolazimi, and Hao Tian for successfully defending their PhD theses! Jiayu has joined Amazon as an Applied Scientist.

  • Jun 2024

    I gave a keynote on "Fake news detection: Limited Ground Truth Limited Text No Understanding of Spreading Intent" at the CySoc Workshop 2024 (at ICWSM 2024).

  • 2024

    I have joined the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST) as an Associate Editor.

  • Jul 2024

    Our survey "Higher-Order Networks Representation and Learning: A Survey" has been published in SIGKDD Explorations.

  • Fall 2023

    Welcome to Zhaoyang Cao who is joining our group as a new PhD student!

  • May 2023

    I have been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at Syracuse University!

  • 2023

    I served as Multidisciplinary Track Co-Chair at ASONAM 2023.

  • Dec 16, 2022

    We will be presenting a tutorial on noise at TheWebConf 2023.

  • Dec 5, 2022

    Congratulations to Shengmin Jin and Xinyi Zhou for sucessfully defending their PhD theses!

  • 2022

    Our team was Runner Up in the US Department of Energy Solar Forecasting Competition.

  • 2022

    Our research on fake news has been highlighted in ACM's AI/ML showcase on the Kudos platform.

  • Apr 2022

    I gave a keynote at the 2nd Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation through Credible Information Retrieval (ROMCIR 2022) at ECIR 2022.

  • Jan 15, 2022

    We will presenting a tutorial on noise enhancement at SDM 2022 and one on interpretable network representations at WWW 2022.

  • Sep 2021

    I gave a keynote at the 3rd Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM) - Oxford Internet Institute.

  • Jan 14, 2020

    We will present the first work on modeling the intention of fake news spreaders at WWW 2022.

  • Oct 1, 2020

    Our survey on fake news research (ACM Computing Surveys) is now available online

  • Sep 24, 2020

    Shengmin's paper on graph-based identification and authentication has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE).

  • Aug 24, 2020

    I have received an NSF CAREER awarded

  • Oct 1, 2017

    We have received an NVidia Education Grant

  • May 10, 2016

    Souradeep Sinha successfully defended his thesis on gender inequality in online reviews

  • May 1, 2016

    Kandarp Makwana will be joining Microsoft.

  • Nov 20, 2015

    Chinese translation of our textbook, social media mining, is out. See an introduction here and the translation here