Kalina Bontcheva Appointed Chair of EU Working Group on AI Transparency

We are thrilled to announce that the vera.ai scientific director Professor Kalina Bontcheva has been appointed Chair of Working Group 1 for the new Code of Practice on the Transparency of AI-Generated Content.

This pivotal new Code, established under the EU AI Act, is crucial for fostering trust in the digital ecosystem. Working Group 1 is specifically tasked with developing transparency obligations applicable to providers of generative AI systems (European Commission, 2025). This mandate aims to ensure that AI-generated synthetic content, which is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from real content, is properly marked and labeled, thereby addressing risks of misinformation, deception, and manipulation.

From research to regulation: the vera.ai link and connections

Kalina Bontcheva is a professor who leads a 20-strong research team at the School of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is furthermore a visiting Senior Researcher at the Big Data for Smart Society Institute in Bulgaria. Her new leadership role directly leverages Kalina's extensive expertise in AI, misinformation, and digital forensics. This is especially true of the foundational work conducted as part of our vera.ai EU project.

The outcomes of projects like vera.ai — which focused on developing and validating cutting-edge AI-powered tools and solutions for content verification and automated disinformation analysis  — will provide some of the essential technical and policy groundwork for the new Code of Practice. Research partially supported by the vera.ai project demonstrates the ease with which widely available Large Language Models (LLMs) can be misused to generate highly convincing personalised misinformation both in English and in multiple other languages. 

We look forward to the development of a Code of Practice that reflects a deep understanding of the technical realities of AI, helping to ensure a trustworthy information environment for all European citizens.

To read more about the appointed chairs for the new Code of Practice, please visit the European Commission's announcement here.

Author / editor: Jochen Spangenberg (DW), based on information supplied by Kalina Bontcheva.

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