USC Information Sciences Institute
Luca Luceri
Research Assistant Professor & Lead Scientist · Founder & CEO, dotNex
Director of the SIGNALS Lab at USC ISI. Research at the intersection of machine learning, network science, and computational social science — advancing the safety and resilience of AI-mediated information environments. He is also Founder and CEO of dotNex, an AI-powered threat intelligence company countering coordinated influence operations.
Research Focus
Core Research Areas
Building scientific foundations for trustworthy, accountable AI systems and governance-relevant measurement tools that bridge technical findings and policy.
Influence Operations & Information Integrity
Developing AI-driven behavioral models to detect coordinated inauthentic behavior, identify cross-platform narrative manipulation, and uncover LLM-powered influence campaigns threatening democratic discourse.
Multi-Agent AI Systems
Studying emergent collective behaviors in networked LLM agents, including how strategic coordination arises and how it can be governed in AI-driven information environments.
Trustworthy & Accountable AI
Building governance-relevant measurement tools that bridge technical findings and policy, enabling transparent content moderation and regulation of social media at scale.
SIGNALS Lab
News
Latest research, publications, and activity from the SIGNALS Lab at USC ISI. View all news →
Report
AI-Generated Military Personas on TikTok
Lab investigation documenting a network of ~110 AI-generated military persona accounts, covered by The New York Times.
Publication · WWW 2026
Emergent Coordinated Behaviors in Networked LLM Agents
Modeling the strategic dynamics of information operations among networked large language model agents.
Publication · WWW 2026
Cross-Platform Narrative Prediction
Leveraging platform-invariant discourse networks to forecast how narratives migrate across online ecosystems.
Publication · ICWSM 2026
Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior on TikTok
Challenges and opportunities for detecting coordinated activity in a video-first ecosystem.
Service
General Chair — AAAI ICWSM 2026
Luca Luceri serves as General Chair of the 2026 International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
Award
Best Student Paper Honorable Mention
"Synthetic Politics" recognized at ACM HyperText 2025 for work on AI-generated political imagery on X.
Venture
dotNex
Translating a decade of influence-operations research into deployable threat intelligence.
Luca is Founder and CEO of dotNex, an AI-powered threat intelligence company that detects and counters coordinated influence operations. dotNex focuses on video-first platforms — TikTok, Reels, and Shorts — where inauthentic coordination is hardest to surface with existing tooling, giving governments, platforms, and organizations the means to move from detection to response.
Visit dotnex.ai →