11 PhD Positions in the MSCA Doctoral Network HYBRIDS

False rumours, fake news or hate speech against vulnerable minorities through social media are becoming one of the main threats against democracies. A global strategy against disinformation is crucial as open democratic societies rely on free citizens with the ability to access verifiable information so that they can build their own opinions on different political issues. The main scientific objective of HYBRIDS is to provide researchers with the knowledge necessary to design strategies and tools to respond to disinformation on the basis of a deep analysis of public discourse. There have been interesting advances in the automatic detection of disinformation by making use of natural language processing and new artificial intelligence techniques in the specific field of machine and deep learning. However, this is a very complex task that requires a high degree of natural language understanding, inference and reasoning. To improve the strategies to deal with disinformation and abusive language, HYBRIDS will integrate the structured knowledge provided by social and human sciences into natural language processing tools and deep learning algorithms, so as to develop new hybrid intelligence systems. The concept of Hybrid Intelligence consists of combining machine and human intelligence to overcome the shortcomings of existing artificial intelligence methods.

The HYBRIDS Consortium is coordinated by the University of Santiago de Compostela and involves the following partner universities, research centres, non-profit organisations, and companies: University of Caen (UCAEN, France), University of Coruña (UDC, Spain), University of Evora (UEVORA, Portugal), Radboud University (RU, the Netherlands), Queen Mary University of London (QMUL, UK), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC, Spain), Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK, Italy), Gesis Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences (GESIS, Germany), Fondazione Openpolis ETS (OPENPOLIS, Italy), Fundación Universidad Empresa Gallega (FUEGA, Spain), Factoria de software e multimedia S.L. (IMAXIN, Spain), Industrieanlagen Betriebsgesellschaft MBH (IABG, Germany), and Newtral Media Audiovisual SL (NEWTRAL, Spain).
The 11 doctoral candidates will be contracted by one of the partner institutions through which they will be enrolled in a doctoral programme. Each candidate will participate in secondments with other academic and non-academic partners and will be involved in network-wide training activities.
We look for outstanding, motivated and team-spirited candidates to carry out a PhD within the HYBRIDS project and who will get unique international and inter-sectoral training from prominent European researchers (from both academy and industry).

The available positions within the HYBRIDS project are the following:

DC1: Towards an automatic characterization of micro-level structures in discourse from social networks (hosted by RU, the Netherlands)
DC2: Analysis and measurement of the impact of political discourse in the citizen’s opinion (hosted by CiTIUS-USC, Spain)
DC3: Identifying the stance of argumentative opinions in the political discourse (hosted by FBK, Italy)
DC4: Analysis of political propagation campaigns in social networking platforms (hosted by UEVORA, Portugal)
DC5: Analysis of the role of disinformation to automatically identify hate speech against immigrants on multilingual social environments (hosted by FBK, Italy)
DC6: Detection of toxic bots in Twitter by analysing textual content (hosted by UNICAEN, France)
DC7: Detection of hyperpartisan political news (hosted by CiTIUS-USC, Spain)
DC8: Hybrid data generation and retrieval for the detection of online harassment (hosted by GESIS, Germany)
DC9: Claim verification for fact-checking (hosted by NEWTRAL, Spain)
DC10: Detecting harassment on social media beyond isolated messages (hosted by UDC, Spain)
DC11: Cross-lingual claim detection for fact-checking (hosted by QMUL, United Kingdom)

Please note that you may apply to multiple positions (max. 3). If you do so, please indicate your preference.
Apply: https://hybridsproject.eu/jobs/