brendan.spillane@adaptcentre.ie
Dr. Brendan Spillane an Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies in University College Dublin (UCD) and a Funded Investigator in the Science Foundation Ireland ADAPT Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology.
After completing his PhD in Computer Science in Trinity College, he held concurrent positions as a Postdoctoral researcher on the H2020 PROVENANCE project developing advanced tools to detect and warn users of disinformation, and he undertook a two-year Government of Ireland IRC Postdoctoral Fellowship conducting a Systematic Literature Review and Meta Analysis of 24 years of research into human judgements of credibility to inform the design of new tools and theory to analysis disinformation.
His work is focused on Human Judgement of Information which is at the intersection of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Behavioural Science and Information Science. Common topics in his work include Bias, Credibility, Misinformation and Disinformation, News, and Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference.
Dr Spillane is the Principal Investigator of the 3-year, €4m, 18 partner Horizon Europe VIGILANT project (www.vigilantproject.eu). The exciting project, which kicked off in November 2022, will equip European Police Authorities with advanced technologies from academia to detect and analyse disinformation campaigns that are linked with criminal activities. His winning proposal received a perfect 15:15 score. He is now actively involved in several other European project proposals related to disinformation.
He recently set up the Harmful Information Working Group in ADAPT to help coordinate research into misinformation, disinformation, hate speech, violent nationalist, extremist, radicalisation, incel, bullying, online safety, and terrorist related content. He is also a member of the Irish Government’s working Group to develop a National Counter Disinformation Strategy
Research Areas:
Misinformation, Disinformation, Bias, Credibility, News, Information Security, Human Judgement of Information at the intersection of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Behavioural Science and Information Science.
– Misinformation, disinformation and other related forms of problematic content (e.g., hate-speech, radicalisation, incel, extremist).
– Bias, credibility and news in general
– The intersection of HCI and news, specifically relating to the design of and interactions with news websites and news apps
– The intersection of dialogue agents and misinformation and disinformation
– Dialogue agents as news providers
– Visual, auditory and message cues of disinformation
– Perception of human like agents in information confused environments