ICT students 'hack the night'

Every semester begins with a kind of pressure cooker, says Lennart de Graaf, lecturer at Fontys ICT Eindhoven and Tilburg. In this pressure cooker, the students are divided into groups that devise a solution for a practical case study. In this case, it was 'Hack the night', in line with the 'We demand the night' campaign. "Actually, we had a different case ready," says De Graaf. However, reality, with several recent cases of femicide and the murder of Lisa in Abcoude, turned everything upside down.

"Safety is also a theme among students," says De Graaf. That is why experts from the Stop Street Harassment Foundation and the welfare organisation Lumens were called in. In a few meetings, they outlined the problems surrounding street harassment and domestic violence.

The Student+ then set to work on ideas for solutions. De Graaf: "The experts remained involved. They kept a critical eye on things. If, for example, you come up with an app with an alarm button, you are actually putting the problem back on the victim."

According to the experts, the questions should be much more: how do you ensure that bystanders do more? And also: how do you ensure prevention? De Graaf: "How does someone come to behave in a certain way and how do you intervene in the right way?"

Oliver Dohnal (20, second-year student) and Evy Knops (18, also a second-year student) have an idea about this. With their group, they came up with an interactive way to make secondary school pupils more aware of bullying.

The bystander's perspective

"We looked at it from the perspective of the bystander's reasoning," says Dohnal. "We involve them in a role-play in which they have to decide whether or not to intervene." The aim is to stimulate discussion among pupils: when is behaviour acceptable and when is it not?

Knops and Dohnal show it on a screen. Knops plays the role of Doyle, a male puppet who encounters Sophie, another puppet, in various situations. Dohnal speaks Sophie's lines. After each scene, a random member of the audience has to say what they would do—intervene, for example, pretend to know Sophie, or talk to Doyle. This immediately provides food for thought for the audience. "Sophie seems to be able to handle him in this situation, so I would stay nearby and wait and see. What would you do?"

Brandon Aerts (20, second year) and Nicole van der Sluis (22, fourth year) zoomed in on the problem a little further. "Online harassment is also harassment," says Aerts. "Many people have to deal with nasty comments or other negative

Activity on social media." Many existing solutions in this area can easily be circumvented, for example by rewriting certain blocked words in a different way. Aerts and Van der Sluis's group therefore trained an AI model that not only recognises negative comments, but also their context. The comment is then blurred in the image. "We have tested that model with a number of people, but of course we still need to develop it further," says Van der Sluis.

"Four days is nowhere near enough to create a fully developed solution," says De Graaf. "We are now going to work with the students and Lumens to see which solutions we can develop further."

An article from the Eindhovens Dagblad