The second international forum of the GATE institute on Big Data and AI was held online on the 8th-9th of December 2021. It was organised as a set of five panels on various topics capturing the main areas of work of the GATE institute and Disinformation research and policy responses in the Balkans was one of the topics covered.
The panel was moderated by Prof. Kalina Bontcheva from GATE Institute. The keynote speech was delivered by Veni Markovski, Member of the European Commission Expert Group on Tackling Disinformation and Promoting Digital Literacy Through Education and Training. He gave a broad overview of the societal challenges and emphasized the crucial role of education in combating disinformation.
Maria Bielikova from the Central European Digital Media Observatory presented the AI Research on Addressing Disinformation in Central Europe. Katarína Klingová from GLOBSEC talked on the Vulnerabilities of Western Balkan countries, Ralitsa Kovacheva, Sofia University and Factcheck.bg presented the achievements of the first Bulgarian fact-checker in her talk “Factcheck.bg – lessons learned and challenges ahead”.
I had the pleasure of summarising the achievements of the team of Gate Institute which currently includes Dr. Irina Temnikova, an Experienced researcher and our student interns Silvia Gargova, Hristiana Nikolaeva and Ivo Dzhumerov. I am sharing the slides of the presentation which provided some background on the current situation in Bulgaria, summarised our work and looked into our future work.
While the panel at the previous event was still focused on the work done globally, this event demonstrated a new level of engagement and contribution to the topic at GATE institute – watch the space for further developments!