Polish National Centre for Research and Development (NCBR) granted 6.6 mln PLN to spin-off company of the University of Warsaw for realisation of a programme of detection of disinformation actions and fake news in source materials, including those in social media, Internet portals and accessible repositories.
NCBR funding was given to the Information Refining Centre for realisation of the project IKONA (Identification, collecting and rating – in Polish Identyfikacja, KOlekcjonowanie and oceNA – of unfriendly disinformation operations in the cyberspace, based on ICT tools). The project is related with technologies and procedures in the area of protection against informational threats in the virtual space – the university informs.
“IKONA is a system which identifies, worldwide, thematic sources of information, then accumulates the available texts and analyse them – ultimately in real time. The outcome is the identification of unfriendly information and its sources”, says professor Wiesław Cetera from the Faculty of Journalism, Information and Bibliology of the University of Warsaw, the co-founder of the Information Refining Centre. Also professor Włodzimierz Gogołek from the same faculty is involved in the project.
The system worked out in frames of the project will serve as a fake news detector for source materials in Polish, English or any other language that can be automatically translated into Polish or English. The source of data will be broadly understood online resources – social media, portals and repositories.
In their analyses, the scientists will use BigData and AI algorithms, including machine learning and statistics tools.
The IKONA project will be implemented for 30 months since the signing of the funding agreement by the scientifical consortium: the Information Refining Centre and the University of Warsaw, which is a shareholder of the IRC via its SPV UWRC.
WP / source: PAP
