New Technologies

EU Project : ARTICONF
ARTICONF addresses issues of trust, time-criticality and democratisation for a new generation of federated infrastructure, to fulfil the privacy, robustness, and autonomy related promises that proprietary social media platforms have failed to deliver so far. Transparent, decentralised infrastructure : Simplify creation, integration and federation of agile decentralised social media platforms by creating a novel permissioned ...

A scientist’s opinion : Interview with Radu Prodan about the future of Social Media Networks
Interview with Radu Prodan, ARTICONF project coordinator and Professor at the Institute of Information Technology, University of Klagenfurt, Austria, about the need to create smart, decentralised social media networks. What are the main problems with current social media networks? Social media today does not live up to its promise. Radu Prodan: Social media applications connect ...

A scientist’s opinion : Interview with Kate Orton-Johnson about the sociological context of digital technologies
The sociological context of digital technologies, a scientist’s opinion Interview with Kate Orton-Johnson, Programme Director of the Masters in Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh and ARTICONF project partner, about the importance of considering social and cultural aspects when developing new digital technologies. How did you get involved in the ARTICONF project? Kate Orton-Johnson: ...

More democratic, transparent and reliable : the next generation social media
Social media platforms are used by one-third of the world population, they are changing how we find partners, access news and engage with politics. But the rise in disinformation and data privacy breaches are denting public trust. Is it too late to harness the potential of social media for good?

A scientist’s opinion : Interview with Henry Ajder about Deepfakes
The key point I would make about regulating deepfakes is that, in some cases, new laws may be needed, but much of the harm deepfakes cause is covered by existing laws, or could be covered by amending existing laws.

A scientist’s opinion : Interview with Denis Teyssou about Deepfakes
Synthetic audio means that it will be possible to make any person say anything, making it even easier to make politicians or celebrities victims of deepfake as there is a lot of publicly accessible audio of their voices.

Deepfake, shallowfake and speech synthesis: tackling audiovisual manipulation
Despite alarmist news stories about deepfake heralding the end of democracy or truth itself, the technology – for better or worse – is far from perfect, which suggests that there is still a window of opportunity to prepare society, institutions and regulatory frameworks for the moment it is. The state of play Deepfakes (i.e. synthetic ...

A scientist’s opinion : Interview with Sam Gregory about Deepfakes
Rhetoric about the ‘end of truth’ plays into the hands of people who already are saying you can’t believe anything – and that is neither true of most audiovisual material, nor true yet for deepfakes. We should not panic but prepare instead.