During our participation in European projects, we focused on systematically creating new digital tools and training modules to support the acquisition of skills, especially of people with a low level of skills, to enhance their key competencies and adapt to the new digital age. Our work expanded rapidly during COVID ’19 pandemic since a huge number of people had to develop basic digital skills to adapt to the labour market transitions. At the same time, the schools were using online platforms for their courses causing stress to the students, the teachers and the parents. Furthermore, we are focusing on gender equality, by allowing women to participate in our education and training activities and to develop entrepreneurial skills. Our organization is currently involved in training development for personal data protection regarding AI, big data, mass biometric surveillance and cybersecurity. Furthermore, we addressed the need for equal inclusion of people 65+, especially in terms of digital illiteracy, depression, dementia etc. Our projects aim to foster the participation of the elders in the community and to promote active ageing. Moreover, MindSpin focused on tackling the raising number of hate speech attacks on immigrants and other minorities that have raised over the last years. As more and more people have moved online, individuals are inclined toward racism, misogyny, or homophobia. In 2021, MindSpin team has created an open-source API ‘’Hate speech analyser’’ for organisations to effectively analyse hate speech in social media. https://github.com/papargyri/Hate-Speech-Detection Meanwhile, MindSpin works towards the mitigation of the dissemination of fake news, i.e., news with intentionally false information, which brings significant negative effects to society. This requires multi-source information such as news content, social context, and dynamic information as well as social awareness of the accuracy of information. Our current activities are: • Exploration of social contexts such as user engagements and social behaviours. • Understanding and development of comprehensive datasets which contain news content, social context, and dynamic information could facilitate fake news propagation, detection and mitigation • Cooperation in the research initiative FakeNewsNet which focuses on fake news studies on social media. • Training of individuals and organisations on fake news characteristics and critical thinking.
