Two dreams accompanied the early stages of the Internet revolution. The unprecedented availability of information would have made us more educated, aware, and intelligent than ever. In parallel, our new technological ability to connect with everybody else would have improved our mutual understanding, social cohesion and social dialogue. Despite the incredible achievements of the Information Age, reality is going down a path far from those dreams. Even worse, we have no clear idea yet of where this road is taking us.

The “Infosphere Team, a joint initiative of CSL – Paris and Sony CSL – Rome, is rethinking Information Technologies to make information more accessible and social dialogue more transparent, understandable, and healthy. We investigate the information ecosystem in all its instantiations: news market equilibrium, social dialogue, polarisation, values and emotion, dynamics of success, and content production. The challenge has a high degree of complexity, and we tackle it by combining techniques from data science, complex systems physics, machine learning, and natural language processing.