Grants

SURE-GB: Identifying Gender Bias in Machine Translation

SURE-GB is an innovative project focused on identifying and addressing occupation-related gender biases in machine translation (MT), particularly in translations between English, French, and Greek. Machine translation systems, widely used in our daily interactions, can inadvertently perpetuate societal biases. SURE-GB aims to tackle this issue by developing an automated service that detects three types of gender bias in MT:

• Under-representational bias: When gender assignment in translations reflects the low representation of a specific gender in linguistic corpora, even if it's accurate to reality.
• Stereotypical bias: When gender assignment reinforces harmful stereotypes, for example, translating "professor" as masculine despite the presence of many female professors.
• Algorithmic bias: When bias arises from technical shortcomings in MT systems, unrelated to actual gender representation in data.

Key Features:

• Curated Knowledge Graph: We are building a knowledge graph that encodes standardized data for occupations based on sources like the European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS), the International Classification of Occupations (ISCO), and sociolinguistic statistics.
• Machine Learning Toolkit: Our toolkit uses the knowledge graph to automatically detect and categorize gender biases in translations, providing actionable recommendations to improve accuracy and fairness in machine translation systems.
   

Why It Matters:

Gender bias in machine translation doesn’t just reflect societal prejudices—it can reinforce them, contributing to deeper inequalities. By identifying and categorizing these biases, we aim to raise awareness and establish guidelines for more equitable translation practices.

Video Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAkWg0ciiw8&ab_channel=UTTER-UnifiedTranscriptionandTranslation

Code: https://github.com/ails-lab/Sure-GB

CRAFTED brings together a diverse consortium composed of experienced Europeana aggregators - European Fashion Heritage Association7, EUscreen8, MUSEU-HUB9, and the Greek national aggregator SearchCulture.gr10, 15 museums and archives from 8 European countries, eight of them involved directly in the consortium, and seven involved through the Greek national aggregator (ten of these institutions are providing content to Europeana for the first time), the Europeana Foundation, and experienced technology partners with the aim to aggregate new high-quality datasets on Europeana, provide novel technologies to enrich collections and carry out public engagement and dissemination activities to promote crafts heritage. The project sets out to achieve six specific objectives:

- Increase the amount of high-quality, multimodal content on Europeana.

- Define and deploy an innovative human-in-the-loop methodology and accompanying toolset for the optimized automatic enrichment of large amounts of CH metadata

- Enhance interest in European crafts and rejuvenation of craft practices.

- Support the takeup of AI and crowdsourcing technologies in the Cultural Heritage sector.

Partners:

1. National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)-established in Greece

2. Michael Culture Association (MCA) - established in Belgium

3. Stichting Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (NISV) - established in Netherlands

4. European Fashion Heritage Association (EFHA) - established in Italy

5. Stichting Europeana (EF) - established in Netherlands

6. AG Culturele Instellingen Antwerpen/Erfgoed (AG CIA) - established in Belgium

7. DATABLE BV (DATABLE) - established in Belgium

8. Université du Luxembourg (UdL) - established in Luxembourg

9. MINISTERE DE LA CULTURE ET DE LA COMMUNICATION - Mobilier national et manufactures nationales des Gobelins, de Beauvais et de la Savonnerie (MCC) - established in France

10. Museum of Arts and Crafts (MUO) - established in Croatia

11. STOWARZYSZENIE MIEDZYNARODOWE CENTRUM ZARZADZANIA INFORMACJA (ICIMSS) - established in Poland

12. Fondazione Museo del Tessuto di Prato (FMTP) - established in Italy

13. Etablissement public Paris Musées (PARIS MUSEES) - established in France

14. NATIONAL DOCUMENTATION CENTER – EKT (ETHNIKO KENTRO TEKMIRIOSIS KAI ILEKTRONIKOU PERIECHOMENOU) (EKT) - established in Greece

This Action aims to build connections between the Europeana and the Automated Translation Digital Service Infrastructures (DSI) for the benefit of both:

i to improve usability of heritage resources by enriching datasets on Europeana as well as datasets provided by cultural institutions with multilingual metadata; and

ii to significantly enrich the language resources available through the ELRC-SHARE repository by adding millions of records describing cultural heritage items.

The Action will deliver to ELRC-SHARE at least 10 million metadata records to be sourced from the Europeana API, processed and tagged. The resources will include records with data in parallel languages and, where not possible, monolingual records, covering the 24 EU official languages. All provided resources will have a free reuse license (CC0).

Moreover, the Action will train and deploy automated translation engines customised to serve the needs of the Cultural Heritage domain. The engines will be delivered to the European Language Grid (ELG) and will become part of an end-to-end pipeline and a fully-fledged supporting set of tools that connects the two DSIs. The pipeline will be used to source metadata records from Europeana and cultural heritage content providers, to process and translate them to English, evaluate the results, insert the translations as enrichments to cultural heritage metadata records, manage and deliver them to the Europeana platform or to individual Cultural Heritage Institutions’ platforms.

As a result, the provided tools and platforms will be made openly available in order to enable cultural heritage institutions, service providers and other interested parties to reuse the individual tools under different use cases.

The Europeana Translate workflow will be applied to translate at least 25 million Europeana metadata records to be published back to the Europeana Core service platform.

Partners:

1. National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)

2. European Fashion Heritage Association (EFHA) - established in Italy

3. Stichting Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (NISV) - established in Netherlands

4. Pangeanic SL (Pangeanic) - established in Spain

5. Stichting Europeana (EF) - established in Netherlands

6. Michael Culture Association (MCA) - established in Belgium

OLA is a 2-year Erasmus+ European project (2021-2023) coordinated by CNR-IRPPS that, following the crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemics, aims at giving an impetus to “open educational resources” and “open educational practices”, as an opportunity to reduce the digital divide in the European educational context, building a more inclusive society.

Open educational resources – intended as free digital educational resources, collaboratively developed by teacher networks with other social actors – already exist, but are still a fragmented reality, not enough widespread and valued at institutional level. OLA project aims at promoting their development and diffusion by means of: MOOC courses for teachers; creation of guidelines about open educational resources for teachers and editors; participative building of an open access online platform usable by teachers to develop and spread multimedia educational scenarios.

By the end of the project, 80 interdisciplinary scenarios related to STEAM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics) will be developed, 50 of which will be tested in the 5 partner countries: Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Romania and Spain.

A central issue transversal to the project is paying attention to recognizing stereotypes – starting from, but not limited to gender – and values implicitly conveyed by school textbooks and multimedia online resources, so as to promote a wider concept of “digital competences”, including not only strictly technological competences, but also the capability of using online platforms and information sources critically and responsibly, as a premise for exercising a conscious and informed citizenship.

Partners: 

• Greece: National Technical University of Athens
                1° Peiramatiko Gymnasio Athinas of Athens
• Italy: CNR-IRPPS (international coordinator of the project)
            Istituto Comprensivo Carducci-King of Casoria
• Cyprus: University of Cyprus
• Romania: Scoala Gimnaziala Mircea Eliade of Craiova
• Spain: Centro de Formación Somorrostro of Muskiz

STIRData Action proposes the use of Linked Data and semantic technologies as the means to overcome the technical barriers that hamper the reuse of open data, namely, poor quality and limited availability of Open Data. In particular, the Action seeks to assist data providers through a set of data specifications, guidelines, and an accompanying harmonisation toolset for streamlining and facilitating the process of enriching and publishing company data as Linked Data.

An online platform for searching, navigating, synthetically analysing, and visualising company-related open data content coming from different sources in a homogeneous way will also be developed, supporting a number of cross-border and cross-domain reuse scenarios. These sources will include company registries, sources discoverable via the European Data Portal (EDP) and other open data platforms. The offered functionalities will be exposed via an open Application Programming Interface (API), so that they can be reused by other digital public services or applications developed by data and ICT companies.

In particular, during the project lifetime, data referring to at least 1.5 million companies from at least five different countries will be published as Linked Data and become searchable and navigable via the STIRData platform. The enhanced datasets will be also published to the national open data portals of Greece (data.gov.gr), Norway (data.norge.no), and Czechia (data.gov.cz) so that they can be harvested by the EDP.

The overall STIRData approach, technical tools, and online services will be of a general purpose and can be uptaken to facilitate harmonisation and reusability of open data in other domains.

Partners

1. National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)

2. UNIVERZITA KARLOVA (CU) - established in Czech Republic

3. Masaryk University (MUNI) - established in Czech Republic

4. Registerenheten i Brønnøysund (BRREG) - established in Norway

5. DIGITALISERINGSDIREKTORATET (Digdir) - established in Norway

6. General Secretariat of Digital Governance and Simplification of Procedures of Ministry of Digital Governance (MINDIGITAL) - established in Greece

7. Athens chamber of commerce and industry (ACCI) - established in Greece

8. THINKCODE LTD (ThinkCode) - established in Cyprus

The CrowdSchool project moves from this situation to underline the importance of human and social capital as articulated in the aims of Erasmus+. The project intends to propose a new model for:

- enhancing schools with new interactive methods for increasing the creative thinking skills of students, taking benefit of the potential present in the digital repositories of cultural institutions.

 - creating an innovative tool for applying STEAM Education (i.e. a combination of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) as an access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking.

Partners

1. Michael Culture (Belgium)

2. National Technical University of Athens (Greece)

3. Steps (Italy)

4. European Fashion Heritage Association (Italy)

5. Stowarzyszenie Miedzynarodone Centrum (Poland)

6. L. Artistico Liceo F. Arcangeli (Italy)

7. Zespol Szkol Drogowo-Geodezyjnych i Licealnych im. Augusta Witkowskiego w Jaroslawiu (Poland)

8. Ecole Elementaire Polangis (France)

9. Calliope Education (Spain)

The project encourages citizen science in cultural heritage through the application of crowdsourcing and co-creation tools to some of Europe’s largest open digital collections. It contributes to the notion of European citizenship by enabling stakeholder communities to jointly take responsibility for their heritage advocating an open approach to otherness and a European community spirit surmounting regional and national differences. CitizenHeritage will address researchers in the field of Cultural Heritage, including PhD and Master students from different relevant research fields (Cultural Studies, (Art) History, Memory studies, but also Digital Humanities, Cultural Economics and software engineering) to train them in inducing, governing and leveraging on citizen participation, digital crowdsourcing and co-creation. These methods and activities will teach students how to take sustainable and economic viable decisions when engaging citizens. In order to optimize efficiency, CitizenHeritage will map and critically assess current practices with regards to their educational value and user friendliness. But the project will also develop and test new methods and activities, making use of large European digital collections that help to highlight the relevance and power of cultural diversity.

Partners

1. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)

2. Photoconsortium International Consortium for Photographic Heritage (Italy)

3. National Technical University of Athens (Greece)

4. Web2Learn (Greece)

5. Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (Netherlands)

About the MediLudus

The project focuses on three important characteristics that affect the lives of people suffering from age-related problems:

• Physical Fitness: One of the most common problems for older people is the loss of independence in living due to reduced mobility and general physical fitness. In most cases, the presence of a trained physiotherapist is required to improve the patient’s condition, in collaboration with the treating physician, or a support person who can support the patient in his daily activities on a permanent or temporary basis.
• Intellectual ability: beyond the reduction of cognitive abilities in an elderly, a number of medical conditions can also reduce the extent of a patient’s skills. Here, too, the help of a therapist is often required to help the patient develop new skills or regain what he or she has lost, while specialized help is also required for the cognitive and memory component.
• Social activity: the above problems often have as a side effect and the isolation of the patient, contributing to the lack of motivation for social interaction and the feeling of inactivity. The change in the life habits of the person, but also in his abilities, need the help of a specialized psychologist who will design an intervention scheme for each specific patient, according to his background and characteristics, and a therapist who will support him in his socialization.

The MediLudus project proposes the development of an integrated home medical monitoring system and the provision of incentives and suggestions for improving living conditions for the elderly living alone or without ongoing monitoring and support. This system has two poles: one is related to a local system of decisions and motivation of the patient by providing intangible rewards for individual or repetitive actions that improve his life and encourage compliance with medical instructions, while the second pole with the use of sensors in the home and on the patient (wearable sensors) which constantly provide information about its activities and clinical picture, but also about the conditions prevailing in the home (temperature, air quality, lighting). This system collects data, generates suggestions for improving the quality of life at home, informs the treating physician and the patient’s relatives if any of the medical measurements correspond to any of the risk models selected by the doctor for the patient. specific patient, while at the same time applying individualized mechanisms and gamification rewards, in order to motivate the patient to implement his suggestions, but also to follow the exercise and social activity program that may have been prescribed by the treating physicians. Based on the sensors at home and on the patient, various medical problems or accidents can be covered, such as falls or an unplanned departure from home (which can lead to an accident or endanger the lives of certain patients), while the living conditions that may be related to the system proposals are improved by simple movements (eg opening a window for air supply or temperature change) or the use of simple technological tools (eg calling a relative to enhance the patient’s social interaction). Gaming includes activities related to exercise, social contact, cognitive training or learning games, and the observance of safety rules and good conditions in the home.

Mediludus incorporates:

• A decision system that enables the treating physician to design an individualized follow-up plan for the user.
• Home medical information monitoring and communication system with doctor and relatives, whenever the system deems it necessary.
• Providing personalized advice and incentives / rewards for adhering to what the doctor has prescribed.
• Personalized interaction with physical, mental, and social activities to enhance the patient’s respective skills.
• Gaming system that enhances the social activity of the user and increase the sense of satisfaction when using the application.

INCLUDE is a 3-year Erasmus+ European project (2019-2022) coordinated by CNR-IRPPS aimed at developing a communal European framework for Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) in secondary school that promotes, besides linguistic and disciplinary competences, also key-competences for lifelong learning suggested by the European Council, with particular reference to the digital, personal and social, citizenship and cultural awareness competences. The concept of “Europeanity”, intended in an inclusive and open way – as a sense of belonging to a European community where linguistic and cultural differences are considered as a resource – is a transversal element that the project aims to value, in order to promote active citizenship and prevent populism, xenophobia and violence.

Among the objectives of the project there is the participative development of an open access, multimedial and interactive online platform usable by teachers to develop and share CLIL scenarios. 120 interdisciplinar scenarios will be developed within the project, 40 of which to be tested in the 5 European partner countries: Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Romania and Spain.

Funded by ERASMUS +

The Action aims at leveraging photographic content from 1950's in Europe, increasing the engagement of citizens with the Europeana content, involving user interaction, crowdsourcing and co-curation of digital content. The Action will implement an intelligent visual similarity search. It will use demonstrator applications web/mobile and augmented reality services in order to improve the end-user experience by supporting discovery and further use of the photographic content in Europeana and combining it with personal experience and own material. It will improve the Europeana database integrating back-end tools to allow users to manipulate photographic collections, then interacting with the source Europeana database to update the existing records with the crowdsourced annotation, contents and addenda. The Action will also develop a community of users for awarenessraising on Europeana content and its potential. Moreover, it will create an educational portal including a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). Lastly, it will yield data that are beneficial to support curation work.The tools that are created and tested under the overarching theme of 50s in Europe will be developed so as to allow their re-use within other thematic frameworks. In particular the outcomes of this Action will be used to enrich the Europeana Photography and Europeana Migration thematic collections with new stories, new and interesting photographic materials, and other compelling resources for the users’ benefit and engagement.The tools developed will be sustained for at least two years after the end of the Action.

Funded under: Innovation and Networks Executive Agency (INEA)/ Connecting Europe Facility (CEF)/ ICT / A2017