Jonathan Feldman

Jonathan Feldman

Over the last decade, there has been a vast increase in eating disorder diagnoses and eating disorder-attributed deaths, reaching their zenith during the Covid-19 pandemic. This immense growth derived in part from the stressors of the pandemic but also from increased exposure to social media, which is rife with content that promotes eating disorders. This study aimed to create a multimodal deep learning model that can determine if a given social media post promotes eating disorders based on a combination of visual and textual data. A labeled dataset of Tweets was collected from Twitter, recently rebranded as X, upon which twelve deep learning models were trained and evaluated. Based on model performance, the most effective deep learning model was the multimodal fusion of the RoBERTa natural language processing model and the MaxViT image classification model, attaining accuracy and F1 scores of 95.9% and 0.959, respectively. The RoBERTa and MaxViT fusion model, deployed to classify an unlabeled dataset of posts from the social media sites Tumblr and Reddit, generated results akin to those of previous research studies that did not employ artificial intelligence-based techniques, indicating that deep learning models can develop insights congruent to those of researchers. Additionally, the model was used to conduct a time-series analysis of yet unseen Tweets from eight Twitter hashtags, uncovering that, since 2014, the relative abundance of content that promotes eating disorders has decreased drastically within those communities. Despite this reduction, by 2018, content that promotes eating disorders had either stopped declining or increased in ampleness anew on those hashtags.

Jonathan Feldman

The Covid-19 pandemic induced a vast increase in adolescents diagnosed with eating disorders and hospitalized due to eating disorders. This immense growth stemmed partially from the stress of the pandemic but also from increased exposure to content that promotes eating disorders via social media, which, within the last decade, has become plagued by pro-eating disorder content. This study aimed to create a deep learning model capable of determining whether a given social media post promotes eating disorders based solely on image data. Tweets from hashtags that have been documented to promote eating disorders along with Tweets from unrelated hashtags were collected. After prepossessing, these images were labeled as either pro-eating disorder or not based on which Twitter hashtag they were scraped from. Several deep-learning models were trained on the scraped dataset and were evaluated based on their accuracy, F1 score, precision, and recall. Ultimately, the Vision Transformer model was determined to be the most accurate, attaining an F1 score of 0.877 and an accuracy of 86.7% on the test set. The model, which was applied to unlabeled Twitter image data scraped from "#selfie", uncovered seasonal fluctuations in the relative abundance of pro-eating disorder content, which reached its peak in the summertime. These fluctuations correspond not only to the seasons, but also to stressors, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Moreover, the Twitter image data indicated that the relative amount of pro-eating disorder content has been steadily rising over the last five years and is likely to continue increasing in the future.

Jonathan Feldman, Tal Feldman, Annie I Anton

Biological AI tools for protein design and structure prediction are advancing rapidly, creating dual-use risks that existing safeguards cannot adequately address. Current model-level restrictions, including keyword filtering, output screening, and content-based access denials, are fundamentally ill-suited to biology, where reliable function prediction remains beyond reach and novel threats evade detection by design. We propose a three-tier Know Your Customer (KYC) framework, inspired by anti-money laundering (AML) practices in the financial sector, that shifts governance from content inspection to user verification and monitoring. Tier I leverages research institutions as trust anchors to vouch for affiliated researchers and assume responsibility for vetting. Tier II applies output screening through sequence homology searches and functional annotation. Tier III monitors behavioral patterns to detect anomalies inconsistent with declared research purposes. This layered approach preserves access for legitimate researchers while raising the cost of misuse through institutional accountability and traceability. The framework can be implemented immediately using existing institutional infrastructure, requiring no new legislation or regulatory mandates.

Luhang Sun, Varsha Pendyala, Yun-Shiuan Chuang et al.

This paper leverages large-language models (LLMs) to experimentally determine optimal strategies for scaling up social media content annotation for stance detection on HPV vaccine-related tweets. We examine both conventional fine-tuning and emergent in-context learning methods, systematically varying strategies of prompt engineering across widely used LLMs and their variants (e.g., GPT4, Mistral, and Llama3, etc.). Specifically, we varied prompt template design, shot sampling methods, and shot quantity to detect stance on HPV vaccination. Our findings reveal that 1) in general, in-context learning outperforms fine-tuning in stance detection for HPV vaccine social media content; 2) increasing shot quantity does not necessarily enhance performance across models; and 3) different LLMs and their variants present differing sensitivity to in-context learning conditions. We uncovered that the optimal in-context learning configuration for stance detection on HPV vaccine tweets involves six stratified shots paired with detailed contextual prompts. This study highlights the potential and provides an applicable approach for applying LLMs to research on social media stance and skepticism detection.

Jonathan Feldman, Tal Feldman

Recent advances in generative biology have enabled the design of novel proteins, creating significant opportunities for drug discovery while also introducing new risks, including the potential development of synthetic bioweapons. Existing biosafety measures primarily rely on inference-time filters such as sequence alignment and protein-protein interaction (PPI) prediction to detect dangerous outputs. In this study, we evaluate the performance of three leading PPI prediction tools: AlphaFold 3, AF3Complex, and SpatialPPIv2. These models were tested on well-characterized viral-host interactions, such as those involving Hepatitis B and SARS-CoV-2. Despite being trained on many of the same viruses, the models fail to detect a substantial number of known interactions. Strikingly, none of the tools successfully identify any of the four experimentally validated SARS-CoV-2 mutants with confirmed binding. These findings suggest that current predictive filters are inadequate for reliably flagging even known biological threats and are even more unlikely to detect novel ones. We argue for a shift toward response-oriented infrastructure, including rapid experimental validation, adaptable biomanufacturing, and regulatory frameworks capable of operating at the speed of AI-driven developments.