Katarzyna (Kasia for short) Budzynska (Lead PI) is an associate professor in the Faculty of Administration and Social Science at the Warsaw University of Technology Poland. She is head of the Laboratory of The New Ethos. Kasia studies argumentation and persuasion linking philosophy, linguistics and AI. She has published 2 books and over 90 peer-reviewed papers including 23 papers in international journals such as Synthese, Argumentation, Discourse & Society and Artificial Intelligence. Her projects have attracted over €1.4m grant funding in Polish, Swiss, British, German and European programs. In 2008, she co-founded, and since then has coordinated the activities of nationwide ArgDiaP Association. Kasia is the Lead PI of the iTRUST project where she focuses on WP4 and WP6, studying linguistic manifestation of polarisation and working on technology of trust analytics.

Ewelina Gajewska is a PhD student at the Warsaw University of Technology. Her research interests center around computational social science combining methods from natural language processing and psychology. In the iTRUST project Ewelina is responsible for the development of trust analytics in WP4 and interventions in WP6.

Barbara (Basia for short) Konat is a linguist and philosopher based in the Faculty of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She employs computational and psychological methods to explore emotions in persuasion. She is the Principal Investigator of the National Science Centre-funded grant "ComPathos: towards the new model of pathos for computational rhetoric" (2021-2023). Basia has authored several peer-reviewed papers in notable journals and conferences, such as "Metaphor and the Social World," "Behavior Research Methods," and "Informal Logic." Her research outcomes have contributed to the fields of argumentation, emotion analysis, and computational linguistics. In the project, Basia will focus on the emotional dynamics in argumentation, working towards the methodology of capturing pathos, i.e. appeals to emotion and their relation to polarisation (Work Package 4). 

Marcin Koszowy is a philosopher working in the areas of logic, philosophy of language, pragmatics, and artificial intelligence. He serves as Deputy Head of Laboratory of the New Ethos at the Warsaw University of Technology, Poland. He has published 2 books and over 30 peer-reviewed papers, co-edited 10 journal issues (including the special issue of the journal Argumentation devoted to “The Polish School of Argumentation”), participated in 5 research projects funded by the Polish National Science Center (NCN) and delivered 15 invited talks. In iTRUST, Marcin is involved in project’s outreach activities aimed at designing strategies for efficient education of young people that would build their critical thinking skills and dispositions applicable for identifying polarising tendencies in social media, focusing on WP6.

Alina Landowska is an Assistant Professor at the SWPS University, a Member of the Scientific Committee at the Center for the Axiology of New Technologies and Social Transformations, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and is a Research Collaborator at the International Council for Small Business housed within The George Washington University's Department of Management. Her research is dedicated to the anticipation of socio-cultural and economic futures, with a particular emphasis on moral perspective. She employs a comprehensive research approach that combines qualitative and quantitative approaches with different methodologies, including NLP. In the iTRUST project, Alina is engaged in the research on Moral Argument Analytics, which is an extension of Trust Analytics, outlined in the WP4.

Jakub Pruś is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Ignatianum University in Cracow working in the areas of logic, theory of argumentation, and rhetorics. He also popularizes the logical culture and critical thinking on YouTube (@logikacodzienna). In iTRUST, Jakub is involved in project’s outreach activities, such as creating series of videoclips discussing the research results (work package WP6). 

Konrad Talmont-Kaminski is the Head of the Society & Cognition Unit at the University of Bialystok. His research focuses on the cognitive and evolutionary basis of religion. In the iTRUST project he is working with the Barcelona team on an agent-based model of polarisation that utilises epistemic vigilance theory in WP5 and WP6.

Marie-Francine Moens (PI) is a professor at the Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven. She is holder of the ERC Advanced Grant CALCULUS (2018-2024) granted by the European Research Council. From 2012 till 2016 she was the coordinator of the MUSE project financed by Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) - Open of the European Commission. She is currently associate editor of the journal IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI). She is a fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). Her research topics include: machine learning for natural language, speech and image processing, especially learning with limited supervision; representation learning for language grounding in the physical and social world; deep learning and latent variable models; machine learning models for structured prediction and generation; language understanding, information extraction from text, content recognition, machine reading, semantic parsing, text mining, knowledge acquisition in the biomedical and legal domains; argumentation mining and reasoning; joint processing of vision and language; and content and email filtering.

Liesbeth Allein is currently a PhD candidate in computer science at KU Leuven. Previously, she was a doctoral researcher at the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Commission. She specialises in natural language processing and information retrieval with a focus on information verification and disinformation detection. She is also interested in integrating social knowledge and temporal reasoning in neural networks. Within iTRUST, she works as a postdoctoral researcher and mainly contributes to WP3, in which she will mine implicit patterns in text that signal online misbehaviour. 

Andrea Rocci (PI) studies argumentation with a focus on the language and semantics of arguments and on corpus-based research on argumentation in the contexts of financial communication, journalism and social media.  He is professor of linguistics and argumentation and director of the Institute of Argumentation, Linguistics and Semiotics at the Università della Svizzera italiana; he is also co-director of the Doctoral Programme in Applied Linguistics: Managing languages, arguments and narratives in the datafied society LAND. He has published extensively in semantics, discourse analysis and argumentation, with a special focus on the semantics of modality (Modality in Argumentation, Springer 2017), evidentiality and, more recently, the discursive functioning of counterarguments and concessions.

Nataly Pineda Castañeda is currently a doctoral student at the Università della Svizzera italiana, affiliated with the Institute of Linguistics, Semiotic, and Argumentation (IALS). With a background in argumentation theory, her research focuses on the relationship between argumentation and framing in online discussions on climate change in social media. She will contribute to the project primarily in WP1 and WP2, where she will play a role in designing the guidelines for framing annotation.

Carles Sierra (PI) is the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) located in Barcelona. He is the President of EurAI, the European Association of Artificial Intelligence. He has been contributing to Artificial Intelligence research since 1985 in the areas of Knowledge Representation, Auctions, Electronic Institutions, Autonomous Agents, Multiagent Systems and Agreement Technologies. He is or has been a member of several editorial boards of journals, including AIJ and JAIR, two of the most prestigious generalist journals. He was the editor-in-chief of the JAAMAS journal, specialized in autonomous agents. He organized IJCAI, the most important international artificial intelligence conference in 2011 in Barcelona and was the President of the IJCAI Program Committee in 2017 in Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the European Association of AI, EurAI, and recipient of the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award 2019. Carles is in charge of WP5 focusing on the formalization of multi-agents models of social media users that can be used to analyze, understand, and simulate polarization and trust phenomena.

Maria Vanina Martinez (Vanina for short) obtained her PhD at University of Maryland College Park and her postdoctoral studies at Oxford University. Since 2023, she is a Ramon and Cajal Fellow at the Artificial Research Institute IIIA-CSIC in Barcelona. Previously, she was a researcher at CONICET in Argentina and assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science at University of Buenos Aires. In 2018 was selected by IEEE Intelligent Systems as one of the ten prominent researchers in AI to watch. She received the 2021 Argentine National Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences Stimulus Award in the area of Engineering Sciences and the 2023 Konex Award in Science and Technology. Her research is in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning, with a focus on knowledge dynamics, management of inconsistency and uncertainty, and the study of the ethical and social impact of Artificial Intelligence.

Vanina will work on package WP5 focusing on the designing of simulation environments designed for the analysis of users' interactions in social media modeled through artificial intelligent agents.

Virginie Van Ingelgom (PI) is professor of political science and a F.R.S. – FNRS Senior Research Associate Professor at the Institut de Sciences Politiques Louvain-Europe, UCLouvain. Her research interests focus on the issue of democracy and legitimacy, citizens’ attitudes, affective polarization and in qualitative and mixed methods. She was awarded with an ERC Starting Grant (2017-2023) for her project QUALIDEM – Eroding Democracies. As a social scientist, within the iTrust project, Virginie’s will mainly touch upon WP5 and she will conduct research on affective polarization and trust.