VIGILANT: Vital IntelliGence to Investigate ILlegAl DisiNformaTion

  • Active
  • Programme: Horizon Europe
  • Call: HORIZON-CL3-2021-FCT-01-03 - Disinformation and fake news are combated and trust in the digital world is raised
  • Start date: 01.11.2022
  • End date: 31.10.2025

The VIGILANT project builds an integrated platform of advanced disinformation identification and analysis tools tailored to Police Authorities (PAs) use cases and needs, developed by following an ethical-by-design and user-centric approach.

Project website: (under development)
CORDIS website: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101073921
Social Media: (under development)

Contact: Petar Ivanov

Project Overview

Identifying, tracking and investigating online disinformation and other problematic content is an extremely complex problem. Many (European) Police Authorities (PAs) do not have access to any specialised tools or technologies to help them combat disinformation.

VIGILANT addresses this problem with solutions that detect and analyse disinformation from all major sources (major social media platforms, fake news websites), in all modalities (text, image, video) and in multiple languages. Organisations with expertise in social sciences and humanities, ethics, computer science, commercial and five European PAs comprise the project’s interdisciplinary consortium working to develop a platform for investigating disinformation related crimes. It equips PAs with tools for investigating hate speech, violent nationalist or separatist movements, radicalisation, extremist groups, incels, lone wolfs, and other terrorism threats.

Ontotext’s Role

Leveraging its AI and knowledge graph expertise, Sirma AI (trading as Ontotext) will contribute to the VIGILANT project with data ingestion and storage, knowledge engineering, enrichment and search. Building upon its previous contributions to the fight against disinformation, from the WeVerify and Pheme projects, Ontotext develops a graph database capable of storing data of various modalities, formats and languages. The resulting knowledge base is enriched through the use of various semantic, AI and NLP techniques to provide the user with all available context when evaluating whether a particular piece of content is disinformation.

Ontotext will also contribute to the development of a disinformation response manual for security professionals to improve knowledge about disinformation, how it works and how it may be countered.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No:101073921. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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