Industry and Innovation Fellowships – Round 2

This project will explore the next generation of online and technology-facilitated harms affecting women and girls, from deepfakes and synthetic media to immersive technologies and AI-enabled coercion. The Fellow will lead a horizon-scanning exercise, analysing global trends, risk typologies, and implications for policing readiness.  

This project will examine how policing can ethically collaborate with online platforms and industry partners to share intelligence and identify risk-related patterns of offending across digital ecosystems (e.g. dating, gaming, and social platforms). The Fellow will help design a governance model, stakeholder map, and practical framework for responsible data-sharing to enhance public protection.  

This project investigates the psychological impact of investigating online sexual and gender-based harms, focusing on resilience, supervision, and wellbeing among digital investigators. The Fellow will identify best practice models and produce recommendations for force-level implementation.  

This project explores the convergence between sexualised online offending and ideologically motivated harassment or extortion (e.g. “Com” networks). The Fellow will analyse hybrid offender behaviours, develop typologies, and identify investigative and prevention opportunities for policing.  

This project will explore how technology facilitated harms against women and girls are facilitated and mitigated at different stages of the software development lifecycle. The Fellow will lead a reflexive activity on their own organisational experience, analysis of industrial codes of conduct, policies and guidance documents, and conclude with implications for future technology development and governance.  

This project will explore current practice of technology companies in compliance with UK legal requirements set by Online Safety Act 2023. The fellow will lead an empirical study to collect primary data and/or secondary data about ‘Safety by design’ practices in the technology industry, especially to reflect the best practice and challenges faced by stakeholders to implement the legal requirements in the UK.    

During the synthesis phase of the design process, designers take different perspectives (including their own, the users’, and the businesses’) to make sense of data and problems, to come up with design decisions and artifacts. This project will explore the impact of gender biases or stereotypes during sense making activities within the community of design research and design practice.  

This project would aim to explore how markers of difference including but also beyond gender (e.g. race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, etc) intersect to impact both the experience and interventions around online violence in a specific context (e.g. dating apps, online companions, etc). The specific question would be developed in collaboration with the fellow.   

This project would aim to map existing support and resources available to (local?) schools to address online sexual violence among students. Once complete, existing provision could be audited to identify strengths, limitations, specificities and inconsistencies.  

This project will explore how existing Responsible AI frameworks are implemented in practice, and where they fall short in preventing online harms against women and girls. The fellow will undertake an extensive, systematic landscape review of current Responsible AI principles and standards, and examine how these translate into real-world practices. The project will identify gaps both in the frameworks themselves and in how they are operationalised, particularly where shortcomings contribute to the creation, amplification or neglect of harms affecting women and minorities online. The outcome will provide evidence-based insights into where Responsible AI practice succeeds, where it fails, and what changes are needed to ensure technology development better protects women and vulnerable groups from online abuse and violence.   

This project will investigate the radicalisation pathways that lead people, particularly men, into the manosphere. Using social media data, we will examine the micro (individual), meso (social), and macro (global) factors that draw men into these communities. The study will analyse the content they post, the external sources they link to, and the networks they form within and across online communities to understand influence and dominant narratives. Particular attention will be paid to the mental health issues that emerge and to how these shape men’s perceptions, beliefs, and self-conceptualisations. The overall aim is to better understand why men are drawn to these spaces and to use this knowledge to inform appropriate strategies for mental health support, education, and initiatives that strengthen social connection among men, thereby preventing and mitigating engagement with these communities and the adoption of misogynistic narratives. This is a cross-disciplinary project that combines human behaviour research and responsible AI approaches for large-scale data analysis. Therefore, we seek expertise in textual and social data analysis (including programming skills) and/or in psychology and social science focused on men, radicalisation, and online harm. 

This project will examine how humans are relying on AI companions and the implications of those interactions for real face-to-face interactions and relationships. The fellow will work closely with charity organisations and frontline services to understand whether, and in what circumstances, people turn to AI chatbots for companionship, the motivations behind this use, and the nature of the questions and conversations taking place. Insights from this qualitative work will then inform a second phase of the project to assess the potential impact of these virtual interactions into real relationships. The project aims to generate evidence on both risks and potential benefits, contributing to guidance and design recommendations that ensure AI companion tools are safe. 

This project will explore semi-automatic methods to populate and extend an existing ontology of online gender-based harms. The fellow will investigate approaches for extracting relevant data from online news, platforms and public conversations, and combining these with a human-in-the-loop process to ensure accuracy and contextual understanding. Working alongside domain experts, the fellow will test and refine techniques to identify and classify concepts, instances and relationships relating to online harms and gendered violence, and integrate them into the ontology. The aim of the project is to develop novel, responsible methodologies that support scalable ontology building while retaining critical human oversight, ultimately strengthening the representation and understanding of online gender-based harms.