STA joining two new EU-funded development projects this year

The lead partner in the TWON project, exploring how the selection of certain mechanism of social networks affects the entire system, is the University of Amsterdam.

The project aims to develop new empirical methods to study these mechanism based on a kind of duplicates of social networks to determine what kind of mechanisms can be developed to reduce the negative effects of social networks on democratic discourse on profit making platforms.

The EUR 3 million project includes another partner from Slovenia, the Jožef Stefan Institute, three partners from Germany, including the Robert Koch Institute, and the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory of the University in Belgrade.

The OMINO project, which will be carried out by a consortium led by the Warsaw University of Technology, will receive EUR 1.3 million in EU funding and will include an exchange of researchers as part of the Marie Sklodowska Curie programme.

The STA will in cooperation with partners foremost develop models and tools to process the information appropriate for media industry.

The consortium includes the Wroclaw University of Technology, Modul University Vienna, the Bar Ilan and Technion universities in Israel and the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS) in Germany. Associate partners include the Vienna-based company APA IT, the University of Notre Dame in the USA and the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

The STA has been developing new media technologies for more than a decade. "We started systematically working on research and development more than ten years ago and the success with these two tenders is proof that we are on the right track," said Naum Dretnik, head of the digital strategy group at the STA.