Information Controls Fellowship Program 2025 (Funding available) – YOA

Deadline: February 28, 2025

Applications are open for the Information Controls Fellowship Program 2025. The Information Controls Fellowship Program (ICFP) cultivates analysis, outputs, and artistic collaboration on matters associated to repressive web censorship and surveillance.

The ICFP helps researchers analyzing how governments in international locations, areas, or areas of Open Technology Fund (OTF) core focus are limiting the free stream of knowledge, chopping entry to the open web, and implementing censorship mechanisms, thereby threatening the flexibility of worldwide residents to train primary human rights and democracy; work targeted on mitigation of such threats can be supported.

Areas of Focus

• Development and refinement of instruments and methods to repeatedly monitor web interference on a world scale.
• Investigation of knowledge controls, safety, and privateness in standard functions corresponding to search engines like google and yahoo, social media platforms, and prompt messaging functions.
• Leveraging open knowledge to investigate the forms of info controls being carried out and what they’re focusing on.
• Testing inventive strategies and new protocols for censorship circumvention and analyzing community interference measures, together with all types of web filtering.
• Examination of the influence of web censorship and use of circumvention instruments.
• Experimental methods to restrict professional-authorities manipulation of on-line discussions.
• Researching rising, state-sponsored surveillance patterns and evaluation of focused digital threats in opposition to civil society organizations and/or human rights defenders, corresponding to denial of service assaults, social engineering, and phishing assaults corresponding to malware.
• Studying the roles of machine studying and synthetic intelligence in digital surveillance practices in repressive environments.
• Investigating how the traits of quantum computing implicate the realm of Internet freedom and exploring alternatives to make use of this leap in computing energy to evade censorship.
• Other novel concepts and approaches referring to the study of worldwide and regional info controls.

Benefits

• Monthly stipend of $7,000 USD
• Travel stipend of $1,250 to $5,000 USD, relying on the fellowship size
• Equipment stipend of $1,250 to $5,000 USD, relying on the fellowship size

Eligibility

• Open to skilled researchers from quite a lot of backgrounds and disciplines and might embody college students and junior to mid-profession practitioners with demonstrated capability and experience.
• Typically, ICFP fellows have expertise in fields corresponding to laptop science, engineering, info safety analysis, software program improvement, social sciences, regulation, and knowledge visualization, amongst others.

Application

It is a two-stage course of:

• Stage 1: Submit an idea word by way of OTF’s online application system.
• Stage 2: Highly aggressive idea notes might be invited to submit a full proposal along with the proposed host group by way of the net application system.

For extra info, go to Information Controls Fellowship.