ProTechThem

ProTechThem – Building Awareness for Safer and Technology-Savvy Sharenting, is a research project led by the University of Southampton (Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology) and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The project combines traditional and innovative cross-disciplinary approaches to offer a better understanding of sharenting practices, motivations, and risks such as grooming, child abuse, identity crimes (for example, identity fraud and identity theft). ProTechThem aims to develop awareness-raising tools and automated preventative measures for improving cyber security behaviours amongst the public, particularly parents, guardians, and relevant others.


SafeSpaceNLP

SafeSpaceNLP will explore the use of Socio-Technical Natural Language Processing (NLP) for classifying behavioural online harms within online forum posts (e.g. bullying; drugs & alcohol abuse; gendered harassment; self-harm), especially for young people. Their socio-technical AI will explore both zero-shot and graph-based NLP algorithms for behaviour classification, using a cyclic socio-technical methodology. This approach will facilitate incremental use of human feedback for iterative learning and re-ranking, overcoming the limited training data issue and keeping a ‘human in the loop’.