The Técnico alumnus Fernando P. Santos (MSc and PhD in Computer Science and Engineering) received a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant of 1.5 million euros for the RE-LINK: Responsible Link-Recommendations in Dynamic Environment project. Over the next five years, the team will analyse the algorithms of social media responsible for recommending new connections to their users (such as friend suggestions or group recommendations). The project will recruit a team of doctoral and post-doctoral students to develop mathematical and computational models to study how these recommendation algorithms influence the connections users make on social media and, consequently, the information they have access to.
“These algorithms have a strong impact on how social media platforms evolve, i.e. the specific people we send friend requests to, the accounts we decide to follow or the groups we join,” explains the Técnico alumnus. This is how “they impact the information we have access to and our ability to influence or be influenced by others,” he adds. In this sense, Fernando P. Santos stresses that the aim of the project will be to “understand the impact that these algorithms have on social dynamics such as the propensity to spread rumour about other individuals or to spread false and/or malicious information”.
Once this analysis has been carried out, the team led by Fernando P. Santos will study how these constraints on information sharing can influence discriminatory opinions and behaviours or even the decision to be benevolent towards other social media users. The researchers will then try to develop new recommendation algorithms that, in the long term, seek to “promote co-operation and altruism between individuals, mitigate the sharing of malicious content and reduce discrimination between individuals from different social groups”, through questionnaires aimed at the users of new algorithms in order to understand the new effects they may have caused.
About his academic journey at Técnico, the currently Assistant Professor at the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam, stresses “I was prepared to learn complex new topics efficiently and autonomously”, which is “a fundamental skill in a scientific area that is constantly changing, as artificial intelligence”. This is why, says Fernando P. Santos, “Técnico has played a very important role in my current position and in achieving this grant”.
