Tuğrulcan Elmas

Assistant Professor, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

tugrulcanelmas@gmail.com · tugrulcan.com · Google Scholar · LinkedIn · GitHub · YouTube

AI researcher and educator working on large language models and AI-generated media detection. I teach Computational Social Science and Text Technologies in Data Science — around 200 students each per year — at the University of Edinburgh, ranked 22nd in the world for Computer Science & Information Systems (QS World University Rankings by Subject). I have built AI curricula for university students, summer institutes and a general public audience, and I teach and lecture in both English and Turkish.

Academic Positions

Assistant Professor, School of Informatics 2024 – present

University of Edinburgh, UK · Co-Director, SMASH group

Fellow, Generative AI Lab 2025 – present

University of Edinburgh, UK · gail.ed.ac.uk

Postdoctoral Scholar, Observatory on Social Media (OSOME) 2022 – 2024

Indiana University Bloomington, USA

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science 2022

EPFL, Switzerland · The Role of Compromised Accounts in Social Media Manipulation

B.S., Computer Engineering (minor in Philosophy) 2017

Bilkent University, Türkiye · exchange semester at the National University of Singapore

Teaching & AI Education

University courses

Understanding Society with Big Data: Computational Social Science (2026–) — ~200 students per year. Nominated for a University of Edinburgh Teaching Award. Lecture materials published openly at opencourse.inf.ed.ac.uk/css.
Text Technologies in Data Science (2024–) — ~200 students per year. Web search and retrieval-augmented generation. University of Edinburgh, MSc/senior undergraduate.
Evidence, Argument and Persuasion in a Digital Age (2025–2026) — Edinburgh Futures Institute.
Introduction to Object Oriented Programming (2025) — University of Edinburgh.
Distributed Information Systems (2018–2021), Applied Data Analysis (2018), Introduction à la Programmation (2019) — EPFL.

Curriculum design & training programmes

Organiser, SICSS Edinburgh 2025 — Summer Institute in Computational Social Science: an intensive residential programme training early-career researchers in computational and machine learning methods. sicss.io/2025/edinburgh
Book chapter on teaching with generative AI — An Optimistic Outlook on Teaching, Learning and Assessment for Coding With the Emergence of Generative AI, with co-authors at Ulster University, Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh, in Teaching Programming Across Disciplines. Read the chapter
Research supervision — seven current and incoming lab members (postdoctoral, PhD, undergraduate) and four alumni across MSc and undergraduate levels.

Public AI education

Dr. Tuğrulcan Elmas, YouTube — Turkish channel explaining AI, LLMs and social media research to a general audience. youtube.com/@tugrulcan
Panellist, Unmasking the Digital Deception: Defending Against DeepFakes and Disinformation Attacks — Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD) 2025, EPFL, Lausanne. Panellist, AIM Lab Roundtable Discussion. Invited speaker, Bilkent AI Tech Talks on AI and social media. Invited teaching seminar, Johns Hopkins SAIS; speaker at the Scotsman Data Conference 2024 and the Middle East Conference 2024, Doha.
National television and radio appearances in Türkiye on AI and information integrity (TRT Radyo, Cüneyt Özdemir, Ali Tarakçı).

Selected Publications

Full list: Google Scholar

Large Language Models & Human–AI Interaction

How AI Models Manage Epistemic Authority: A Taxonomy and Comparative Analysis of Responses to User Disagreement. Alnasser, Çetinkaya, Zhao, Elmas. Preprint
ChatGPT vs Teachers vs Students: Large-Scale Analysis of Generative AI Discourse in Education Communities on Reddit. Yüce, Dai, Owens, Elmas. ICWSM 2027
An Optimistic Outlook on Teaching, Learning and Assessment for Coding With the Emergence of Generative AI. Watterson, Dabab Nahas, Elmas, Shoukry, Evkaya. In Teaching Programming Across Disciplines, book chapter.

AI-Generated Media & Vision-Language Models

TRACE-Inset: Unified Whole-Image and Partial-Match Image Retrieval with Vision-Language Embeddings. Özdemir, Çetinkaya, Elmas. Preprint
Humans Cannot Detect AI-Generated Media But Communities May — For Now: Collaborative AI Detection in r/RealOrAI on Reddit. Elmas. Preprint
Evaluating Image Forgery Detection and Propaganda in Manipulated Images of the Russian Trolls Campaign. Mohammed, Çetinkaya, Elmas. IEEE Internet Computing, 2026

Machine Learning & Social Media

Density-aware Walks for Coordinated Campaign Detection. Gopalakrishnan, Hossain, Elmas, Sariyuce. ECML PKDD 2025
Large Engagement Networks for Classifying Coordinated Campaigns and Organic Twitter Trends. Gopalakrishnan, Hossain, Elmas, Sariyuce. ICWSM 2025
State & Geopolitical Censorship on Twitter (X): Detection & Impact Analysis of Withheld Content. Çetinkaya, Elmas. CIKM 2025
Ephemeral Astroturfing Attacks: The Case of Fake Twitter Trends. Elmas, Overdorf, Özkalay, Aberer. IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (Euro S&P) 2021 Covered by The Atlantic, The Next Web, ACM TechNews, Le Temps, Anadolu Agency.
Cross-Partisan Interactions on Social Media. Çetinkaya, Ghafouri, Such, Suarez Tangil, Elmas. ICWSM 2025
Misleading Repurposing on Twitter. Elmas, Overdorf, Aberer. ICWSM 2023
Characterizing Retweet Bots: The Case of Black Market Accounts. Elmas, Overdorf, Aberer. ICWSM 2022
The Impact of Data Persistence Bias on Social Media Studies. Elmas. WebSci 2023

Service & Leadership

Advise BBC fact-checkers on verifying suspected AI-generated images and video, including assessing viral material under deadline.
Program Co-Chair, ICWSM 2027 — International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. icwsm.org/2027
Co-Director, Social Media Analysis and Support for Humanity (SMASH) group, University of Edinburgh
Fellow, Generative AI Lab, University of Edinburgh
Organiser, SICSS Edinburgh 2025
Committee member, University of Edinburgh — Ethics Committee, Teaching Committee, Board of Studies
Program Committee: ICWSM, WebSci, CySoc
Conference reviewer: IEEE Euro S&P, CIKM, ICDE, EDBT, IEEE Big Data, WISE, IEEE CIC
Journal reviewer: EPJ Data Science, Online Social Networks and Media, PeerJ, Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences

Grants & Awards

Generative AI Lab Seed Funding, University of Edinburgh — £2,500 for Can LLMs Give Relationship Advice?, with Dr Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya. Building the first large-scale, theory-grounded dataset of online relationship narratives and AI-generated advice, and benchmarking how well large language models understand and respond to complex relational problems. Announcement
Understanding Society with Big Data: Computational Social Science — nominated for a University of Edinburgh Teaching Award (2025)

Languages

Turkish — native
English — fluent; medium of instruction at the University of Edinburgh, EPFL and Indiana University
French — intermediate (B1)