UNBIASED: Fact-provisioning and bias estimation tools for public inoculation against disinformation campaigns

Project facts

Project promoter:
Athens Technology Center SA(GR)
Project Number:
GR-INNOVATION-0009
Status:
In implementation
Initial project cost:
€292,000
Other Project Partners
Athena Research and Innovation Center in Information Communication and Knowledge Technologies (“Athena” RC)(GR)

More information

Description

Athens Technology Center (ATC) is an Information Technology Company offering solutions and services in specific business sectors, including media, banking and retail, utilities and the public sector.

The exposure of citizens to large scale disinformation, including misleading or outright false information, has been acknowledged as a major challenge for Europe. The spread of disinformation is also facilitated by the increasing trend of algorithmic-driven news distribution channels, such as news aggregators and social media.

Their R&D-project UNBIASED aims to combat disinformation online and provide automated tools for fact-checking and identification of reporting bias. The tools developed will be integrated into a news aggregator that will incorporate a large number of different news sources with functionalities that will contribute to combating disinformation and the identification of fake news. Specifically, UNBIASED will offer tools for:

 - real-time content organization and classification

 - analyzing and estimating the various forms of reporting bias

- discovery of debated topics and polarity of news sources - provision of external evidence for fact checking

Athena Research and Innovation Center is one out of two project partners working on UNBIASED. They conducts research in Information, Communication, and Computational Science and Technology, including all areas of data science. In this project, Athena Research and Innovation Center participates with the Institute for Speech and Language Processing - ILSP. ILSP will develop/adapt the modules for real-time data news collection from different news sources, discovery of debated topics, sentiment analysis and polarity estimation, as well as the provision and analysis of external evidence from authoritative sources.

The project will result in 4 new innovative ICT solutions, 1 IPR and 4 jobs created. Also, increased revenues and competitiveness for the entities in the beneficiary country.

Information on the projects funded by the EEA and Norway Grants is provided by the Programme and Fund Operators in the Beneficiary States, who are responsible for the completeness and accuracy of this information.