iDEM: Innovative and Inclusive Democratic Spaces for Deliberation and Participation

Welcome to our newsletter

We're a Horizon Europe project developing AI tools to make information more accessible for everyone. iDEM language tools aim to support people with disabilities, older people and migrants in democratic processes by addressing the language barriers which present an obstacle to their participation.  

iDEM started in January 2024 and in these first 10 months we have been actively developing and sharing our project. Find all our updates in this newsletter!

Zero Discrimination Day

This newsletter looks back on March 1st, when we celebrated Zero Discrimination Day. Its theme this year, ‘We Stand Together’ is becoming more important by the day, as we continue to battle exclusion and promote equality and accessibility.

iDEM: Non-discrimination in democracy.

"Democracy is about including everyone"

Discrimination can take many forms, like unaccessible voting stations, citizen deliberation platforms that are difficult to navigate, or convoluted information that is difficult for many of us to understand.

Jose Luis Martí, PhD, researcher and professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra explains how unaccessible democracy is not democracy at all:

iDEM Ethics Seminar Series

The iDEM consortium has held a number of seminars to ensure the ethical approach of our project and our tool. This includes recognising the forms of discrimination found in Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a part of AI that helps computers understand human language, both written and spoken.

Horacio Saggion, coordinator of the iDEM Project, led an insightful seminar on the biases of NLP models and how the population can recognise and maneuver them when using AI.

Keep up to date with our project to learn more about our ethics seminar series!

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This document is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union´s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under the Grant Agreement No. 101132431. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.