Open to collaboration
Research opportunities with Nostra Veridicus
Research opportunities with Nostra Veridicus
We are an industry partner at the early stage of a significant research programme.
If you are a researcher, student, or academic department looking for meaningful applied work, we would like to hear from you.
Who we are looking for
We are not looking for people to execute a brief. We are looking for researchers who find the questions genuinely interesting and who want their work to have demonstrable real-world impact in digital safeguarding, child protection, and platform safety.
We welcome approaches from: postdoctoral researchers seeking industry collaboration, PhD students looking for an industry-engaged project, academic supervisors seeking a KTP or triple helix partnership, and departments with established ethics infrastructure and experience of applied research.
Current research themes
Each of these represents an open research question that forms part of our core programme. We welcome proposals that address one or more of them.
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01
Theme 1
Harm signal taxonomy construction Developing a peer-reviewed, clinically validated taxonomy of behavioural and linguistic harm signals across gaming and educational platform environments. Disciplinary home: clinical psychology, criminology, linguistics.
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02
Theme 2
Online space observational research Systematic observation of how theoretically derived harm markers manifest in real platform environments. Do the signals that appear in the clinical literature actually look the same in gaming communities and educational tools? Disciplinary home: psychology, sociology, digital humanities.
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03
Theme 3
Dataset construction and annotation methodology Designing and building a clinically annotated dataset for harm detection, with particular attention to cross-cultural validity and false positive distribution across demographic groups. Disciplinary home: computational linguistics, psychology, data science.
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04
Theme 4
Escalation protocol design How should a graduated, wellbeing-first escalation protocol be structured? What are the clinical, legal, and ethical constraints on each level? How should thresholds be defined and by whom? Disciplinary home: clinical psychology, law, social policy.
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Theme 5
Supportive data disclosure design How should a subject access request response be designed for someone who may be vulnerable? This sits at the intersection of data rights, clinical communication, and digital safeguarding — and has not been addressed in the literature. Disciplinary home: psychology, law, HCI.
Funders
We are building something that takes time to do properly. The research phase, before any commercial product exists, is the most important investment the project requires. We are looking for funders who understand the difference between slow-and-right and fast-and-wrong.
What the project offers funders:
- Clear societal mission with measurable outcomes; earlier detection of harm to children and vulnerable adults on digital platforms
- Independent governance; funds do not flow to a commercially driven detection system; they fund a research programme governed by a clinical and academic board
- Regulatory alignment; the project is designed to support platform compliance with the Online Safety Act, the EU Digital Services Act, and the Children's Code. The regulatory tailwind is real.
- Publication and knowledge outputs; the research produces publicly available findings, not just a proprietary product
We are interested in conversations with charitable foundations, research councils, and impact investors whose mandate includes digital safety, child protection, or mental health. We are at pre-seed stage. We are not looking for volume, we are looking for the right fit.
Platform partners
We are not yet seeking platform partnerships at scale. The research must come first. However, we are interested in early-stage conversations with platforms, particularly in gaming and social, who:
Have a genuine safeguarding problem they are not solving adequately with current tools
Are willing to contribute to the research phase, including by providing anonymised data under appropriate agreements
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Understand that the most valuable thing we can offer them is not speed but defensibility, a system whose basis they can explain to regulators, parents, and users
Get in touch
Please tell us briefly who you are and which type of partnership you are interested in. We respond to every message personally.