The annual Pauline and Philip M. Piaker Memorial Lecture will be held on Thursday, September 4, at 7 pm, at the Chabad Center, 420 Murray Hill Rd., Vestal. The guest lecturer will be Joel Finkelstein, Ph.D., who will speak about “Algorithmic Hate: Botification, Antisemitism, and the Machinery of Mass Persuasion.” There is no charge, but reservations are required and can be made here or by calling 607-797-0015. There will be an opportunity for a question-and-answer session after Finkelstein’s presentation. A dessert buffet will follow the program.
“Our father, Philip M. Piaker, started this series in memory of our mother Pauline, who passed away in 1995. We have continued this event after the death of our father in 2003 to bring noted speakers to Binghamton, “ explained Alan Piaker. “The world has changed since the horrific massacre on October 7, 2023, when around 1,200 Israelis and others were killed by Hamas terrorists. This has led to the war in Gaza that is still ongoing. This has also led to a significant rise in antisemitism. Please join us for what will be a compelling talk on matters that are taking place today and have a profound effect on people of all ages. It is important for all of us to understand how social media affects our lives and what we can do to protect ourselves.”
Finkelstein is the co-founder and chief science officer of the Network Contagion Research Institute, which deploys machine learning tools to expose the growing tide of hate and extremism on social media. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where his award-winning, doctoral work focused on the psychology and neuroscience of addiction and social behavior. He currently directs the Network Contagion Lab at the Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience at Rutgers University, where he trains the next generation of students in the field of critical intelligence, social-cyber threat identification and threat forecasting. His work on hate in social media has appeared in “60 Minutes,” The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR and other media outlets. 
As a youth growing up in Tyler, TX, Finkelstein put on puppet shows for birthday parties, making $100 for telling stories about superheroes. Today, Finkelstein, a neuroscientist by training, studies a different form of puppetry: the inner workings of the human brain and how it can be engineered or “botified.”
After undergrad at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a stint at Google, Finkelstein worked with a neuroscientist James Doty to start the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. Their research center focused on understanding the neural origins of compassion and altruism. It was there Finkelstein became interested in the field of optogenetics, which examines how neurons can be genetically engineered with light switching to control the brain. He explored that by using these processes, scientists could “turn on” anxiety and bonding behaviors.
After the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education awarded a grant to Karl Deisseroth, the inventor of the field of optogenetics, Finkelstein took a job in Deisseroth’s Stanford lab and found a new mentor in Deisseroth’s student, neuroscientist Ilana Witten, who graduated from Princeton in 2002. When Witten joined the faculty of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Finkelstein followed her to pursue his Ph.D. in the same field.
At Princeton, Finkelstein’s dissertation involved understanding the neural mechanism to “unlearn bad habits” through an experiment to cause the extinction of a “cocaine memory.” After mice were given cocaine, they formed a preference for the drug. Then Finkelstein studied the mechanisms in mice to erase that memory. By flashing light at neurons in the reward center of the brain, the memory could be weakened, and the addictive spell could be lifted. 
“As Finkelstein came closer to understanding the secrets of the brain, he stumbled across a startling discovery: just as flashing lights could manipulate the brain, social media could influence it, too,” said organizers of the event.