At this year’s re:publica, DIID member Lena Wilms and DIID alumna Anke Stoll were awarded in an idea competition “Civic Innovation Platform” for their idea to develop an approach to analyze and reduce discrimination in AI language models.
The idea was developed in cooperation with the DIID partner Liquid Democracy e.V. The idea competition, which is organized by the German Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, is endowed with 20,000 euros. The group will receive this award as start-up funding to further develop their project “AI-supported moderation of online discussions with low discrimination” (in short: “KI-MoDi”). KI-MoDi is based on KOSMO – a project that emerged from a cooperation of DIID, Liquid Democracy e.V., the Institute for Participatory Design and the research group Deliberative Discussions in the Social Web (DEDIS) at HHU. DIID members Katharina Gerl, Anke Stoll, Lena Wilms and Marc Ziegele worked together on this project until April 2023.
“KOSMO” stands for “AI-supported collective-social moderation of online discourses.” The central focus was the development of an AI-supported system to help moderators of digital discussion platforms evaluate individual contributions and improve the overall quality of discussion. The KOSMO AI supports the moderators by marking incoming contributions according to various criteria. For this purpose, the AI was trained with extensive training data from various online discussions. Among other things, KOSMO is able to recognize toxic comments and unsubstantiated claims.
We are very pleased that the work of our members and cooperation partners has been recognized by such an award and hope for many more fruitful collaborations.