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thinkers.ai to support HYBRIS project
The project deals with the development of automated and AI-based systems for detecting and taking countermeasures for disinformation campaigns in the context of hybrid threats. Thinkers.ai is proud to be one of more specially selected partners to assist in realizing this project.
Vienna, Austria – HYBRIS is concerned with hybrid threats that use online coordinated operations to influence the beliefs and attitudes of selected target groups, mobilize them to act and subsequently compromise physical and digital infrastructure. Disinformation is an essential component of hybrid threats. Disinformation campaigns often aim to stir up fears in the population, which can have different consequences. Regardless of whether the news is false information or not, it is important for security authorities to recognize whether reactions to news on social media and other news channels, or possibly actions organized as a result, pose a threat to people or critical infrastructure. Only when it comes to taking appropriate measures, in the case of the spread of disinformation, is it also a matter of counteracting a threatening development by creating and disseminating counter-narratives based on facts and trustworthy information.
We are excited to be able to contribute with our technology to this so important thought-leading project with all this innovative and excellent partners.
Dr. Isabell Claus
CEO thinkers.ai
What are the objectives of the project and why was it launched?
The project is concerned with recognizing threatening narratives, assessing the threat situation of critical infrastructures and evaluating content with regard to disinformation and hybrid threat categories. The project also aims to increase response capabilities, effectiveness and resilience and to intensify cooperation between security authorities, taking into account legal requirements (rule of law by design) and ethical aspects (ethics by design).
What is the success of the project, in particular what benefits does AI create?
The solution envisaged in HYBRIS aims to increase resilience to hybrid threats and disinformation campaigns in the Federal Ministry of Defense. By using AI in operations, large amounts of data can be processed and analyzed quickly and efficiently, which strengthens the ability to act and increase response capabilities. The development of a governance framework increases cross-sector collaboration and the exchange of analysis results and experience. Michael Suker, Head of the Cyber Documentation and Research Center at the BMLV, considers the future development of the results into a “data intelligence” platform to be particularly relevant.
Which fields of action of the AI strategy are addressed in the project?
- Safety of AI systems
- Social dialog
- Creating and using knowledge
- Infrastructure for AI
- Defining ethical principles
It is particularly important to react quickly to this type of news trend. Therefore, the content preparation of possible counterstatements must begin while they are still in the making. One of the main challenges here is to ensure a comprehensive overview of the currently prevailing trends. The difficulty here is that information is exchanged at high speed via an unmanageable number of information channels and that it is impossible to gain an overview through manual inspection. In addition, the trustworthiness of the information must be assessed in the course of comparing different information sources and modalities. For these tasks, there is an urgent need to support the security authorities with automated and AI-based systems for information screening and overview creation.
The challenge for security authorities lies in coping with the flood of information that comes with the ever-increasing data load.
An overarching goal of HYBRIS is to use artificial intelligence to structure unstructured data in such a way that the broadest possible overview of essential information can be provided. For this purpose, approaches for recognizing relevant narratives such as “suspected fuel shortage”, which represents a threat to the critical infrastructure “traffic” due to the effect of “traffic jams in front of petrol stations”, are to be researched. By recognizing narratives and their context, security forces gain the necessary scope for action to be able to react accordingly. Content structured according to topics, narratives or categories is to be automatically evaluated, e.g. with regard to disinformation, so that a classification with regard to hybrid threats is possible, which further expands the authorities’ scope for decision-making.
HYBRIS is intended to be a prototype for a national data intelligence platform, which will be used to create a decision-making basis for improving the effectiveness and resilience of the Austrian security authorities.
Further information on the project: https://www.kiras.at/gefoerderte-projekte/detail/hybris
