New project: Making democratic spaces more inclusive and accessible for all.

Prof Serge Sharoff and Dr Carlo Eugeni have been awarded EU Horizon funding to take part in the project "iDEM: Innovative and Inclusive Democratic Spaces for Deliberation and Participation (2024-2026)".

Project aims

iDEM aims at addressing the barriers in deliberative and participatory democratic practices through a thorough intersectional analysis of conditions under which the existing structures of power limit participation of marginalised and vulnerable communities who might have limited skills in reading, writing or understanding a fairly complex language required for deliberative and participatory processes. Our vision in this project is to improve this situation by developing artificial intelligence and natural language processing models to make democratic spaces more inclusive and accessible for all. The democratic spaces to be proposed and implemented in realistic use cases will allow debate between different sectors of the society. This will be the first study to investigate artificial intelligence and natural language processing methods as enablers in addressing political inequality for deliberation and participation in democratic spaces.

More information about the project and partners is available on Prof Serge Sharoff's website.