Profs Brian McQuinn at the University of Regina and Matthew Taylor at the University of Alberta were recently awarded a grant from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), for a CIFAR Catalyst grant, called CIPHER: Countering Influence through Pattern Highlighting and Evolving Responses.
Objective: This work will support the development of CIPHER, a human-in-the-loop AI approach designed to help civil society organizations identify and combat foreign influence operations. Pro-democracy civil society groups have highlighted the urgent need for such a tool but lack the AI expertise to develop it independently. CIPHER fills this gap by combining machine learning, existing datasets, and expert human input to ensure accurate and adaptable threat detection. In addition to input from experts on Russia, we will also receive feedback from our national and global civil society network. The project’s primary objective is to develop and rigorously evaluate a proof of concept capable of detecting Russian influence operations across both textual and visual media.
