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The PhD students from the Faculty of Informatics, Pantaleone Nespoli and Mattia Zago, together with Dimitrios Papamartzivanos from the University of the Aegean Sea (Greece), have won the first place in the European and Mediterranean Region section during the initial phase of the competition. Ericsson Innovation Awards in its 2018 edition.

These three students have been selected by the Bot Busters project.

The bots, robots acronym, are computer programs that through the imitation of human behavior can be used to amplify the impact of false news and even manipulate public opinion.

The system proposed by the students highlights the evidence of social bot activities through the analysis of 5G mass data and other artificial intelligence technologies.

This will allow tracing deceptive campaigns to the main actor and will enable organizations to defend themselves.

The bots have jumped to the media after unleashing the controversy during the United States elections won by Donald Trump, accusing Russia of generating false profiles on Facebook to influence the results.

But this is not their only function, they also apply to other more common uses such as selling followers, increasing traffic on web pages or converting a topic into a trending topic.

"This year the Ericson Innovation Awards have received a total of 1,444 applications from more than 4,000 students from 107 countries, placing our team above 1% of the best teams" explains Mattia Zago, member of the winning team that together with his partner PhD students Pantaleone and Dimitrios will compete to reach the final in Stockholm, where they will be eligible for a prize of € 25,000.

For now, the team of the University of Murcia, together with the University of the Aegean Sea, must compete with 14 other teams in the semifinal.

This event, organized by the Swedish telephone multinational, offers students the opportunity to collaborate with Ericsson to promote the future of technology.

Source: Universidad de Murcia