DEMON PRIN22

About the DEMON Project

To study information manipulation we plan to adapt and extend techniques from NLP (to automatically process text) and data/network science (to study information diffusion in online social networks), such as to eventually detect and evaluate the extent to which specific stories are being exploited or weaponized by (malicious) actors in the online information ecosystem.

Data Science

Data collection, clustering of stories and categorization of sub-narratives.

Natural Language Processing

Content-based analysis of manipulation of sub-narratives.

Social Network Analysis

Network-based analysis of manipulation of sub-narratives.

Research Team Members

DEMON is a joint project between University of Cagliari and Politecnico di Milano.

Prof. Maurizio Atzori

University of Cagliari

Prof. Stefano Ceri

Politecnico di Milano

Dr. Francesco Pierri

Politecnico di Milano

Prof. Marco Brambilla

Politecnico di Milano

Prof. Alessandro Campi

Politecnico di Milano

Prof. Cecilia Di Ruberto

University of Cagliari

Dr. Manuela Sanguinetti

University of Cagliari

Dr. Andrea Loddo

University of Cagliari

Luca Zedda

University of Cagliari

Alessandra Perniciano

University of Cagliari

Luca Faccin

University of Cagliari

Davide Antonio Mura

University of Cagliari

Marco Usai

University of Cagliari

The DEMON project puts together two partners with strong, complementary research teams: UNICA has a high international reputation in the Semantic Web and the Data Mining communities and has already successfully applied NLP methods for information extraction from unlabeled text such as those available in social media; POLIMI has worked on the spread of online mis/disinformation using network science and machine learning techniques, showing how social media interactions allow to identify and characterize mis/disinformation in a variety of contexts.