While the research interests comprise more general issues and fields, the DIID-based projects are in the process of being implemented. They are funded research projects or serve to prepare longer-term initiatives, deal with sub-questions or are continuations of existing projects of DIID researchers.
The project ‘Shaping Competition in the Digital Age’ (SCiDA), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Art and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), examines the new regulations introduced in Germany, the United Kingdom and the European Union to regulate the power of digital gatekeepers (e.g. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft) and investigates how they work in practice.
The joint project “Success factors of local e-participation: Mapping and strengthening digital civic participation in German municipalities” (ERLE), funded by the Mercator Foundation, examines the question of what goals German municipalities are pursuing with digital participation and what contextual conditions influence the formulation and achievement of these goals
The BMBF project “Innovative Interventions for Discursive Integration (IndI)” is researching how online discourse can be made more inclusive. The project is part of the BMBF-funded “Integrated Research” (the website is only available in german) cluster.
The DFG project “Hybrid Trust in Voice Assistants (HYVES)” investigates how and under which conditions trust in voice assistants emerges and which role trust plays for their integration into the everyday life of users.
The research project “Supporting Political Decisions with Artificial Intelligence” (UPEKI) explores the question of how AI can support political decision-making processes. The project focuses on online political discussions.
The project “Good Governance and Compliance: AI to support good corporate governance” is located in the “Use Case Economy” of the Manchot Research Group. Here, four subprojects deal with the possibilities and conditions for the application of AI in companies.
The project investigates whether and, if so, to what extent the established philosophical discourse on discrimination is applicable to new forms of disadvantage caused by artificial intelligence methods.
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Research data is essential for science, but many datasets are hidden on websites and in small repositories, or difficult to find because of inadequate metadata. Only a fraction of researchers proactively make dataset metadata available in public portals, and curating them is costly.
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Since the 01. of March 2021, the RAPP project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, is running at the HHU. Academic Performance Prediction Systems, APP systems for short, are used for the early detection of dropouts, the prediction of study times and the prediction of student performance.
The project “Possibilities and Limits of Digital Participation Instruments for Public Participation in the Site Selection Process (DigiBeSt)” is dedicated to researching target group-specific participation options for the socially relevant search for a final repository site.
Public broadcasting is more controversial than ever. However, in public, discussions about it are mostly conducted by the same experts and actors from politics and civil society. In collaboration with two great partners, we want to complement this discourse in an innovative online participation process in order to find out: What needs to change, what should remain in television?
Over the last decade, digital platforms have become important instruments for the joint development of ideas and places for the exchange of political opinions. However, considerable human and financial resources are needed to moderate and evaluate the many contributions.
In the course of the new funding program of the “HHU Future Groups” of the Heinrich Heine University, the rectorate has selected three innovative research ideas to support them financially for a maximum of three years.
The central objective of this project is to make further progress in the theory of hedonic games that have recently developed rapidly and have yielded many interesting results, but also a number of important questions and problems.
This research project falls into the area of computational social choice (COMSOC) where classical social choice theory and economics meet theoretical computer science (in particular, computational complexity and algorithmics) and artifical intelligence (in particular, multiagent systems). The main objective of this project proposal is to study the computational complexity of strategic behavior in two central areas of collective decision making: voting and the allocation of indivisible goods.
The project investigates the influence of personal and media information sources in individual communication networks on the perception of public opinion and on the formation of opinions on current topics. The focus is on the question of how people deal with contradictions in digital environments, for example, with the fact that contributions in mass media contradict user-generated contributions on digital platforms and that both are forwarded and commented on via social media by friends or colleagues who again have a different view.
In recent years, numerous strategy papers on the development of digitization and so-called artificial intelligence (AI) have been published from the European to the state level. What they all have in common is the intention of a stronger orientation toward people and the common good. If politics takes its own claim seriously, it is dependent on the support of an active and enlightened civil society that contributes its needs and ideas to the shaping of digitization policy in a mature and self-determined manner.
Deliberation as a concept has been developed as an ideal-typical approach to renew public communication and participation in the political and social sciences and to enhance the legitimacy of political institutions and their decisions. How values and norms pertinent to the model of deliberation (e.g., rationality, interactivity, and openness) get incorporated into political practice due to legal requirements or local design decisions in order to increase the legitimacy of political decisions has been researched only scarcely.
In recent years, citizen participation has become an important issue for municipalities. Several forms of citizen participation are possible to involve citizens in political-administrative decisions (e.g., noise-action planning or participatory budgeting). For this purpose, some municipalities increasingly use the internet.
In the course of the project, two arguments for increased participation of citizens in political decision-making are investigated; specifically, that participatory processes lead first to a better quality of the decisions and second to more legitimacy of these decisions.