Case study:
Combating the spread of misinformation through Data Science
Need: As misinformation becomes a weapon in information warfare, there is an urgent need to detect and analyse influence operations in near real time. Defence and security agencies require advanced tools to identify, classify and understand coordinated campaigns that target public perception, especially those spread through social media platforms. Cloud-native analytics and AI tools to help defence and security agencies detect and interpret coordinated disinformation campaigns.
Innovation: We helped develop a suite of cloud-native tools that use machine learning, social media analytics, and interactive visualisations to support human analysts in identifying coordinated disinformation campaigns. Key activities: Deploying social media crawlers to collect public data across platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Building real-time backend infrastructure with integration into KAFKA pipelines (Narrate V2). Utilising classification algorithms to detect misinformation and narrative clusters. Designing human-in-the-loop systems to improve accuracy and analyst oversight. Creating intuitive dashboards and UX to support engagement prediction and influence mapping.
Outcome: A scalable, cloud-based system to detect influence operations across social platforms. Visual tools that help analysts identify and interpret emerging narratives. Improved situational awareness for defence and security teams. Platform foundations enabling future research and system expansion (Narrate V2).
Funding: External Grant, Lead CI: A Prof. Marian-Andrei Rizoiu
Case study:
Ranking and scoring legislation against global standards for women’s rights
AI powered analytical tool to rank laws from gender regressive to gender responsive.
Need: Create a digital tool that empowers users to access and compare legislation on women’s rights, ranked and scored for gender responsiveness. Enable the index to be used to uphold women’s rights when drafting legislation, to drive action and reduce disadvantages for women globally.
Outcome: The Gender Legislative Index (GLI) – an analytic tool used to benchmark, score and rank laws on a scale; from gender regressive to gender responsive.
Innovation: A collaboration between law and data science developed AI powered heat-map visualisations to show a meaningful aggregation of different parts of each law’s evaluation by each evaluator; and an algorithm to calculate the overall rankings.
The Gender Legislative Index was instrumental in establishing a new
parliamentary body dedicated to scrutinising draft legislation to advance the needs and interests of Australian women. We believe this collaboration with UTS Faculty of Law and Connected Intelligence Centre marks just the beginning of a transformative journey towards a more gender-inclusive legislative landscape in Australia.
The women’s rights law behind the GLI tells legislators how to do it better
but the data science and machine learning brings the index integrity, while the UX and design thinking brings the GLI accessibility to a wide audience. Rapido Social Impact’s UX proficiency has elevated the Gender Legislative Index to an open access tool, enabling the team to influence activists, legislators and inter- governmental organisations globally.
Professor, Dr Ramona Vijeyarasa, Founder of GLI
Photo credit: Toby Burrows Funding: UTS & External Grants, Lead CI: Prof. Ramona Vijeyarasa
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