We’re delighted to congratulate Dr. Iker Erdocia on being selected as a New Foundations Awardee by the Irish Research Council. In collaboration with Dr. Brendan Spillane from University College Dublin, Dr. Erdocia will lead this timely and impactful project that explores how multilingual perspectives can strengthen efforts to counter disinformation.
This project is supported by DCU’s FuJo Institute, the ADAPT Centre, and funded under the Irish Research Council’s New Foundations scheme.
More information about the New Foundations Award, as well as the full list of awardees, is available here.
Project title:
Understanding and countering dis/misinformation from a multilingual perspective
Co-PIs:
Iker Erdocia, School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies (SALIS), Dublin City University
Brendan Spillane, School of Information and Communication Studies, University College Dublin
Summary:
While generative AI offers opportunities to enhance democratic processes, it also presents numerous risks to democracies. This project, funded by Research Ireland’s New Foundations scheme and supported by DCU FuJo Institute and ADAPT Centre, seeks to mitigate the harmful societal impacts of the digital transition. It does so by understanding and countering dis/misinformation from a comparative European perspective, with a specific focus on medium-sized and minority languages, particularly Irish.
Activities will include a workshop and a series of six webinars that will present an overview of current research across various disciplines, as well as highlight interdisciplinary challenges to be addressed in the near future. By bringing together linguists, media experts, computer scientists, policy makers and other stakeholders, this project aims to open up a space of dialogue to establish a solid network that contributes to the understanding of dis/misinformation in minority language contexts and the development of AI tools to track disinformation narratives in Irish and other under-researched European low-resource languages.
