Marián Šimko
Principal Investigator, Scientific Coordination Committee, Executive Board
Project Overview
In the DisAI project, the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies, DFKI, University of Copenhagen and CERTH joined forces to improve scientific excellence of KInIT in AI and language technologies to fight disinformation.
DFKI, University of Copenhagen and CERTH will be KInIT’s partners and mentors in the project focused exclusively on increasing KInIT’s scientific excellence, expertise and competences.
The R&I ecosystem of Slovakia suffers from a lack of scientific excellence and industry-academia collaboration. Gross Domestic Expenditure on R&I from the private sector in 2020 was 0.5 % of the Slovak GDP, being one of the lowest in the EU. Challenged by the lack of internationalisation, “academic inbreeding” and brain drain (second highest in EU), Slovakia continually ranks on the tail of participation and success rates in EU funding programmes.
The main objectives of the project are improving scientific excellence of KInIT in the selected areas of AI and LT, and strengthening research management and administrative skills and support for excellent research at KInIT.
We focus on disinformation combating, which we consider one of the most important societal challenges to tackle. We already have a rising research track/record and involvement in international initiatives in the area of information disorders. Strengthening KInIT’s competencies will be achieved by building its capacity in three focus areas:
- Multilingual Language Technologies
- Multimodal Natural Language Processing
- Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence
Project in a nutshell
1. KInIT – 1st institute of its kind in Slovakia
2. Improving research excellence in the selected areas
3. Partners from leading counterparts in the EU
4. Strengthening research management and administrative skills
Consortium
Team
Project Leadership
Michal Gregor
Research Component Lead, Executive Board
Michal Kompan
Research Management Lead, Scientific Coordination Committee
Simon Ostermann
Principal Researcher, Scientific Coordination Committee, Executive Board
Symeon (Akis) Papadopoulos
Principal Researcher, Scientific Coordination Committee
George Karantaidis
Project Lead, Executive Board
Anders Søgaard
Principal Researcher, Scientific Coordination Committee, Executive Board
Katarína Házyová
Project Manager
Thierry Declerck
Principal Researcher, Scientific Coordination Committee, Executive Board (dec 2022 – jun 2023)
Matúš Pikuliak
Research Component Lead, Executive Board (dec 2022 – jan 2024)
ResearchComponent: Multilingual LT
Michal Gregor
CBFA Lead Researcher
Simon Ostermann
Principal Researcher
Ivan Vykopal
PhD Student
Kamil Burda
Researcher
ResearchComponent: Multimodal NLP
Sebastian Kula
CBFA Lead Researcher
Symeon (Akis) Papadopoulos
Principal Researcher
George Karantaidis
Researcher
Ivana Beňová
PhD Student
Stefanos-Ioardanis Papadopoulos
PhD Student
Nikos Sarris
Researcher
Tomáš Javůrek
Researcher
Funding
The Twinning scheme aims to enhance networking activities between research institutions from the Widening countries and top-class leading counterparts in the EU. We set our main goal to help safe-guard digital society in Slovakia and beyond by improving scientific excellence and creativity of KInIT in combating harmful content with artificial intelligence (AI) and language technologies (LT).
Objectives
The main objectives of the project are improving scientific excellence of KInIT in the selected areas of AI and LT, and strengthening research management and administrative skills and support for excellent research at KInIT.
Expected Impacts
The research project will focus on claim matching as a representative task of disinformation combating. We will focus will be on raising the reputation and research profile and collaboration attractiveness of KInIT. Wider regional and national impact of the project results will be maximized. KInIT will be introduced at prominent research venues and at academic and industry collaboration events. We plan to integrate into AI and LT international initiatives, such as CLARIN.