DoDaS & RC-Trust Kolloquium

Titles & Abstracts (talks will be given in German):

Trust and reputation in the context of regulatory science (Dr. Leonie Dendler)

Especially since the Corona pandemic, many emphasize the importance of maintaining or strengthening trust in science. For policy advising risk assessment organizations, strengthening societal trust in their own organization is a long-standing concern and a major goal of risk communication. At the same time, building trust presents a particular challenge. As hybrid organizations located at the boundaries of policy and science, regulatory scientific organizations are confronted with a variety of conflicting societal demands. This talk will present the work of a newly established junior research group on reputation and trust building at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (https://www.bfr.bund.de/de/nachwuchsgruppe_empirische_sozialforschung-243348.html). It will focus on the role of participatory science communication and digital solutions, such as the use of blockchain to provide and verify supply chain data, for building trust.

Methods and tools to identify emerging food safety risks (Dr. Axel Menning)

This presentation will introduce the European Commission funded project “Holistic approach for tackling food systems risks in a changing global environment” (https://holifoodproject.eu/). It will primarily address text mining techniques used to identify emerging food safety risks. In addition to introducing our current implementation of weak signal detection, we will discuss how the emergence of transformer models may enhance this approach.

Short Bios:

Leonie Dendler is a senior researcher within the risk communication department of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment leading a research group on the construction of trust and reputation in the context of regulatory science. She has previously worked for the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, the Sustainable Consumption Institute and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester (UK) and Fudan University (China). An environmental scientist by training with a PhD from Manchester Business School (UK), her wider research interest lies in understanding institutional processes across international consumption and production systems with a particular focus on food.

Axel Menning is a researcher at the Study Center for Food Chain Modelling and Artificial Intelligence at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment. His research focuses on the application of text mining, natural language processing, and machine learning techniques to detect emerging food safety issues. Prior to his current position, he worked at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam. Axel holds a PhD in business administration from the University of Potsdam.