Erik P. Bucy is the Marshall and Sharleen Formby Regents Professor of Strategic Communication in the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech University. For the second half of 2018 he will be a visiting senior fellow in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include visual and nonverbal analysis of news and politics, user engagement with media technologies, and normative theories of media and democracy. Bucy's scholarly work has been published in numerous leading journals in communication, information technology, and media politics. He is the author, with Maria Elizabeth Grabe, of Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections (Oxford, 2009), winner of two outstanding book awards, and editor, with R. Lance Holbert, of the Sourcebook for Political Communication Research: Methods, Measures, and Analytical Techniques (Routledge, 2013).

Milad Jalalian Ebrahimi is MA Student and Graduate Research Assistant at Texas Tech University, specialising in the intersection of artificial intelligence, persuasion, and media production. An active researcher in Human-Machine Communication with published work on AI integration in journalism and public perceptions of automation.