National Science Centre to fund JU research into cybersecurity

The National Science Centre (NCN) has published the results of the IdeaLab call for interdisciplinary ground-breaking research projects to be carried out by Polish researchers in collaboration with researchers from countries of the European Economic Area. Within its framework, a 1.3 million euro grant was awarded to a cybersecurity research project led by Dr Jan Jakub Piasecki from the JU Faculty of Health Sciences Department of Philosophy and Bioethics.

The project, entitled #Webimmunization. How can online social networks create collective resilience against misinformation?, will be carried out in collaboration with the Jerzy Maj Institute of Pharmacology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poznań University of Technology, and the University of Oslo. It will be devoted to the subject of resilience to fake news in cyberspace. In particular, researchers will investigate the mechanisms that facilitate the spread of misinformation and attempt to find ways to boost Internet users’ immunity to false information, a process which they call ‘webimmunization’.

‘The project combines perspectives from epidemiology, psychology, philosophy and computer science. Its main goal is to develop tools that can reliably assess the immunity of individual actors and entire networks of online users against misinformation. Moreover, it aims to test how this webimmunitization influences behaviour online and ultimately how it can be increased. Importantly, the project also has a clear focus on ethical dilemmas related to the concept of webimmunization’, reads the abstract of the project. ‘Our project aims at providing novel empirical insights into the mechanisms and processes leading to and resulting from webimmunity, including its ethical challenges. This knowledge we expect to inspire critical future research and to help address some of the most pressing societal issues of our time’.

The IdeaLab call was carried out in compliance with the ‘sandpit’ formula developed by UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and used by the Research Council of Norway under the name of Idélab. The subject of the IdeaLab call organised by NCN is ‘Managing Threats’, which covers challenges arising from the complex processes of our times, such as globalisation, technological change, issues of environment and climate change, demographic change, major waves of migration, geopolitical instability and many others, which bring with them uncertainties (implying threats and, in some cases, opportunities) that European societies have to face.

For more information about the call and a complete list of grants, please visit the National Research Centre website.

source: Jagiellonian University website