William Theisen

Assistant Teaching Professor - University of Notre Dame

A huge ultimate frisbee fan who grew up in a town with two stop-lights, I am now a first year teaching professor in the department of computer science and engineering. I recieved my PhD in Computer Vision in 2024 as a member of the Computer Vision Research Lab at the University of Notre Dame. I was advised by Dr. Walter Scheirer and also worked very closely with Dr. Tim Weninger. My current area of research is political memes (no that's not a joke). In addition to being a "dank memer" I also enjoy playing soccer, reading, working in my garden, and designing amateur board games!

Undergraduate Director of the Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science and Bachelor of Business in Computer Science

Assistant coach of Notre Dame Papal Rage and Board Member of South Bend Ultimate

Resume

View Full Resume

Fear and Loathing on the Frontline: Decoding the Language of Othering by Russia-Ukraine War Bloggers (2024)
Motif Mining: Towards Multimodal Retrieval for Discovering Disinformation Trends in Social Media* (2024)
N-Modal Contrastive Losses with Applications to Social Media Data in Trimodal Space* (2024)
An Avalanche of Images on Telegram Preceded Russia's Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine* (2024)
C-CLIP: Contrastive Image-Text Encoders to Close the Descriptive-Commentative Gap* (2023)
Image Provenance Analysis (2022)
Motif Mining: Finding and Summarizing Remixed Image Content* (2022)
MEWS: Real-time Social Media Manipulation Detection and Analysis (2022)
Artificial Intelligence for Peace: An Early Warning System for Mass Violence (2021)
Automatic Discovery of Political Meme Genres with Diverse Appearences* (2020)

* denotes first author