Research Intern for False Information Dataset Analysis (within International Research Project)

We seek reinforcements for our team solving the international project vera ai (VERification Assisted by Artificial Intelligence), a Horizon Europe project aimed at disinformation analysis and AI supported verification tools and services. In this project, KInIT collaborates with research institutions, software companies and media professionals from across Europe.

The intern will devise a pipeline for automatic analysis of known false information dataset. The dataset currently contains 300K+ fact-checks, some of which are mapped to the debunked content (e.g. social media posts). The dataset is continuously growing (as new fact-checks appear and we download them). The primary aim of the analysis of this dataset is to investigate characteristics of sources that frequently spread disinformation (e.g. how often they are fact-checked, on what topics, by what fact-checking organizations). The analytical pipeline will be deployed live behind an API. Optionally, the intern may also prepare a web frontend for presentation of these informations.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Creation of AI models and methods, statistical analysis, machine learning

• Data acquisition (including cleaning and preprocessing)

• Data annotation and organization of annotation activities

• Application of machine learned models on practical problem solving

• Experimental software development

• Assisting with execution of research studies

Profile (requirements)

• You should have some experience with programming (e.g. several university courses). 

• You should have some experience with statistics (and math in general)

• You should have some experience machine learning basics

• Further nice-to-have skills (not required, you will learn them in KInIT):

• Automatic data collection from the web (scraping, APIs)

• Software development and deployment (including machine-learned models)

Benefits of the internship:

• Improve your data analysis, machine learning and programming skills. 

• Experience best practices of research and project work.

• Opportunity to work on the design of research studies.

• Learn about disinformation ecosystems and methods for their tackling.

• Opportunity to meet the Slovak and European elites in AI and disinformation tackling.

• Work with a very friendly team.

Beyond the vera ai project, the toxic content tackling is one of KInIT’s core application domains. Presently, KInIT is a partner in multiple large grant projects, especially in the Horizon Europe program, where we are teamed up with 1st class European research institutions.