Abeba Birhane

You visit websites. You get cookie/consent banners you must fight through. They contain dark patterns and other manipulative/bad practices. You accidentally allow 1000s of companies to track you across the web and infer intimate details about your health, sexuality, ideology, and more. The EU Commission proposed a simple technical solution for this – let a … Read more

The AI Act requires providers of General Purpose AI Models to publish a document outlining their training data and practices, with enforcement starting from August 2 2026. Till date (18 September) we have analysed and scored over 70 such documents and discovered issues such as difficulty in discovering documents, missing, unclear or ambiguous information, and … Read more

As part of its 6 year National Plan for Irish Language Public Services [1], the Irish government is actively implementing several strategies to integrate and develop tools and resources for the Irish Gaelic language in the public service sector. One of the major strategic themes of this plan is Technology and the active integration of … Read more

The Irish government and local authorities increasingly use social media platforms to communicate their plans and applications for generative AI. This project will conduct a rhetorical analysis of these various announcements. You will collect social media posts from various government departments, ministers, and other relevant authorities and analyse the themes and rhetorical tropes used to … Read more

Since the National Digital (and AI) strategy in 2024 and the updated National Digital Strategy for 2025, the Irish government has promoted the adoption of generative AI tools in internal processing of data and to deliver public services. While media reports and government and company announcements mention such uses, several cases go unannounced or unnoticed … Read more

Automated systems are increasingly used in recruitment and job applications but, due to proprietary rights, they tend to be opaque and difficult to assess. In this project, you will design an audit of LinkedIn’s automated resume ranking system for job applications. You will develop sets of identical resumes in terms of experience, education and all … Read more

Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) can expose users to a range of systemic risks including illegal content, discrimination, harmful content, and manipulation of civic discourse and electoral process. In this project, you will design and run emulated users on the opposite ends of the same interest spectrums (political, social, health) to understand the prevalence of … Read more

AI companion platforms such as Character.AI (CAI) allow people to create and interact with AI-generated characters for entertainment, role play, guidance or companionship. With 4+ million of user-created characters, ranging from fictional figures to representations of real people, CAI provides an opportunity to study the platform comprehensively. Previous work has analysed discourse from users in … Read more

As AI model developers increasingly publish benchmark results alongside new model releases, it is becoming difficult to systematically track which benchmarks are being used and how benchmarking practices change over time. In this project, you will build a tool which extracts all benchmark names from AI research lab model releases (model cards and/or press release) … Read more

The widespread adoption of commercial chatbots calls for reliable tools for systematically evaluating their behaviour. While most work uses APIs to conduct these evaluations, recent work [1,2] has shown that some chatbots’ performance differs when prompted through the API versus through the web browser. In this project, you will build and open source a browser … Read more