Łukasiewicz – PORT, which is part of the Łukasiewicz Research Network, as the leader of an international consortium, has received financing under the Horizon Europe programme for a project aimed at developing new ways to counter information manipulation. The budget allocated for the project is EUR 3 million.

The SAUFEX (Secure Automated Unified Framework for Exchange) project will be carried out by a consortium comprising Łukasiewicz – PORT (leader), the University of Warsaw, the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and academic, technological, and analytical organisations from Finland, Lithuania, and the Netherlands: Faktabaari, Debunk.org and DROG.

The project includes the creation of a unified knowledge base on foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI), as well as the establishment of special resilience councils that will become an advisory body for government representatives and NGOs, providing a collective approach to combating FIMI in European Union countries. The project will use modern artificial intelligence technologies (including NLP, LLM, machine learning, pattern recognition).

Thanks to the invitation to cooperation of the Ukrainian company Osavul, which designs software for countering disinformation in Ukraine, the effectiveness of the used tools and the database created will also be tested in the situation of a real threat of cyber-attacks from another country, during an armed conflict.

“A potentially groundbreaking aspect of the joint work will be the development of protocols for describing and visualising FIMI and other hybrid attacks in real time, which will allow faster response and mitigation of these threats”, explains Tomasz Chłoń, coordinator of the SAUFEX project.

According to him, this could have a significant impact on the resilience of democratic societies to these threats, as well as on the development of new products and services that will have an impact on detecting and countering disinformation and FIMI.

Adrian Andrzejewski