Institute for Digital Innovation (IDI) PhD candidate Nils Riekers recently travelled to The University of Queensland for a research stay at the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES), working with CIRES CI Associate Professor Rocky Chen and his research group.

Earlier this year, IDI hosted Rocky at Hochschule Neu-Ulm for a talk on combating social media misinformation. Now Nils made the trip to Brisbane for a short research stay, continuing the collaboration on multimodal multi-agent systems for hate speech detection.

The visit, funded by a seed grant from the Bavaria-Queensland Research Alliance (PI at HNU: Dr. Adeline Frenzel-Piasentin), enabled an intensive exchange on the joint project. Having both sides visit each other in person made a real difference: it allowed for focused, hands-on collaboration that is hard to replicate remotely and has given the project strong momentum going forward. We’re looking forward to the next stages of this collaboration. The stay concluded with a final presentation to Rocky’s group.

Many thanks to Rocky and his team for the warm welcome and to everyone who made this mutual exchange possible!