Research Projects and Acquired Funding
Overall funding aquired EUR 6.592.568
EU Marie Curie Funding: EUR 1.214.577
BMFTR: EUR 4.377.915
DFG: EUR 162.443
Other: EUR 837.643
Running Projects
BMFTR 01/2027-12/2029: XPLAINER: Explainable LLM Monitoring with Robustness Benchmarking
Partners: JGU Mainz (XplaiNLP)- role: PI, Partners: Fraunhofer Heinrich-Herz Institute (Prof. Wojciech Samek), DFKI Darmstadt (Prof. Kristian Kerstin), Gretchen.AI, associate partner BITKOM and supporting partner BSI
Funding for JGU Mainz: EUR 509.736 , overall budget 1.984.991.
EU CSA Call: HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-DEMOCRACY-01 09/2026 – 02/2029: FIMI-RESIST Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference - Robust European Safeguards and Innovative Systems against Threats
Partners: JGU Mainz (XplaiNLP)- role: Coordinator/PI, Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies (Slovakia), Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (Greece), Universiteit van Amsterdam (Netherlands), Logically (UK), Exorde Labs (France), Cyfluence Research Center (DE), DW (DE), VoxUkraine (Ukraine), Factiverse (Norway)
Funding for JGU Mainz: EUR 692.500, overall budget 3.499.727,50.
DFG ReDis 10/2026 - 09/2029: DUE-FactC: Designs, Uses, & Effects of Fact-Checking Model
Partners: JGU Mainz (XplaiNLP)- role: PI, Prof. Silvia Westerwick TU Belrin - coordinator, Prof. Axel Gelfert (TU Berlin)
Funding for JGU Mainz: EUR 162.443
BMBF Research Group Funding 09/2024 - 08/2027: VeraXtract
Grant Duration: 09/2024 to 08/2027, Grant Number: 01IS24066, Aquired funding amount: EUR 1.403.742
Funding acquired to build up and further extend the XplaiNLP research group within the Quality and Usability Lab of Prof. Möller at the TU Berlin. This funding enables me to be the research group lead with the right to supervise PhD students on my own (Promotionsrecht). Associate partners are DW, dpa, Ubermetrics GmbH, delphai GmbH, DFKI, Prof. Beck and Prof. Meyer.
Associated Partners: dpa, DW, Ubermetrics Technologies GmbH, delphai GmbH, nyonic GmbH, SLT DFKI, Prof. Möller (TUB), Prof. Meyer (Tel Aviv University), Prof. Beck (TUB)
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EU Project 03/2025 - 02/2028: Privacy for Smart Speech Technology (PSST)
Grant Duration: 04/2025 to 03/2028, Aquired funding amount: EUR 521.978
Partners: AALTO University, EUROCOM GIE, INESC ID, Stitching Radboud University, Institut National De Recherche, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, TU Berlin
BMFTR Project: Fake-O-Meter 05/2026-04/2029 : Multimodaler KI-basierter Desinformations-Assistent für Aufklärung und Resilienz im Umgang mit medialen Desinformationen
Partners: DFKI Speech and Language Technology Lab, TU Berlin XplaiNLP group, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg Fachgebiet Mobile Dialogsysteme (MDS), HS Magdeburg/Stendal Institut für demokratische Kultur, Deutsche Welle, Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH, Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg
Funding requested for TUB: EUR 650.292
ProValid 05/2026-04/2027: DEEPGUARD: Election monitoring and spin-off development/BMFTR project news-polygraph
Role: PI (could not be moved to JGU Mainz, hand over to QU Lab, TUB, still supervising the PhD)
Funding: EUR 139.531
BIFOLD Agility Project 12/2024 - 11/2027: FakeXplain
Grant Duration: 11/2024 to 10/2027, Aquired funding amount: EUR 269.100
The FakeXplain project aims to examine different approaches to generating explanations of AI systems used for human-AI collaboration for the disinformation detection task. Explainability approaches such as attention-based explanations, attribution-based explanations, and computational argumentation will be examined throughout the project, but also recent approaches such as Chain-of-Thought Prompting and Mechanistic Interpretability will be examined concerning their meaningfulness and understandability to human users. Project partners.
Partners: Prof. Rieck (TUB), Prof. Samek (Fraunhofer HHI), Prof. Möller (TUB), Prof. Meyer (Tel Aviv University)
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BMFTR Project: VERANDA
Grant Duration: 05/2023 to 04/2026, Grant Number: 16KIS2047, Aquired funding amount: EUR 321.600
The VERANDA project is dedicated to applied research into informational self-determination. This includes the analysis, conception, and implementation of information about risks and the sovereign handling of personal data. The project focuses on both the individual and societal level. Specifically, we are looking at the use case of self-determination over personal and highly sensitive medical data in the area of highly stigmatized groups.
Partners: BIH and IfSS Charité, Q&U Lab Technische Universität Berlin, SLT German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Fraunhofer AISEC
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Past Projects
BMBF Project: news-polygraph
Grant Duration: 05/2023 to 04/2026, Grant Number: 01IS24066, Aquired funding amount: EUR 1.492.547
The news-polygraph project is the biggest research project funded by the BMBF in Germany on mis-and disinformation detection with an overall funding volume of RUR 13.216.784. It brings together partners from industry, media, and research to work on effective solutions to integrate AI as intelligent decision support in the information verification workflow. Hereby, the XplaiNLP team from TU Berlin will focus on the analysis of disinformation of text sources and XAI.
Partners: DW, rbb, QUL TU Berlin, DFKI, Fraunhofer IDMT, Ubermetrics Technologies GmbH, delphai GmbH, Crowdee GmbH, neurocat GmbH, Transfermedia GmbH
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Trilateral Seed Funding for EU Projects: Orchestrating Reliable, Compliant, and eXplainable Agentic AI Workflows (ORCHESTRA)
Grant Duration: 05/2025 to 10/2025, Aquired funding amount: EUR 20.000
Partners: Siemens AG (Joahnna Bronner), Oxford University (Prof. Ani Calinescu), TU Berlin (Prof. Axel Küpper, Dr. Vera Schmitt)
DFG Project: Monetary Evaluation of Location Information
Grant Duration: 02/2020 to 01/2023, Grant Number: MO 1038/28-1, Total funding amount: EUR 233,220
The project goal is to evaluate different methods for the monetary evaluation of privacy. Different user experiments have been conducted, to examine how the monetary valuation relates to various privacy constructs (e.g. privacy concern, awareness, privacy behavior, privacy literacy) and personality traits (e.g. Big 5, passive and active risk-taking, and state of hunger). I was the project leader, but did not acquire the funding for this project!
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Climate Change Center Berlin: ateSDG
Grant Duration: 03/2023 to 12/2023, Aquired funding amount: EUR 60,000
The ateSDG project is funded by the Climate Change Center Berlin Brandenburg. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) announced by the UN in 2015 are integrated into the Sustainability Reports of companies. To collect and aggregate information about the SDGs, Sustainability Reports from companies are analyzed and classified according to their contribution to one or multiple SDGs. The results are visualized in an SDG monitoring Dashboard for the Berlin Brandenburg region, to provide an overview, of which SDGs are worked on by different industry sectors.
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