The DPS Lab is a research group founded and led by Professor Seeck, who has invited long-standing collaborators to join her in a shared programme of research on longer-term ideological influence—across phenomena such as influence operations, manipulative content and practices (including propaganda and disinformation), and soft power—and on the global patterns that sustain these dynamics over time. Central to Professor Seeck’s agenda is an enduring concern with truth: how “truth” is produced, authorised, and circulated; how what we come to accept as truth steadies and orients us in the world; and how, through those very truths, our behaviour, judgement, and relations with others are shaped—making truth not only a condition of social life but also a primary medium through which influence and manipulation operate. With influence increasingly mediated by AI-enabled technologies, the Lab investigates how computational systems, information infrastructures, and media-mediated environments interact with institutions, publics, and geopolitics.
Over time, this work has brought together a community that spans LUT and partner organisations beyond the university, with particularly strong academic links to the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics and Political Science and Waseda University, Tokyo. The Lab’s collaborations are explicitly international in scope, with focused engagement in East Asia and in Global South contexts, and with comparative work that connects these settings to wider global dynamics.
Methodologically, the DPS Lab combines computational social science and computer science with longer-term mixed-method designs, integrating longitudinal and large-scale data with qualitative fieldwork, interpretive analysis, and experiments to trace patterns and mechanisms over time.
The Lab’s programme is anchored in Professor Seeck’s research agenda and long-term scholarly networks, and advanced through multidisciplinary collaboration spanning, for example, political science and geopolitics, journalism and psychology, and information technology through to mathematics. As an inherently interdisciplinary research group, our endeavours span five primary domains situated within the field of global communications.
Professor Seeck also pursues an explicitly public-facing aim: to mitigate the effects of disinformation through research. This entails not only the systematic study of disinformation, influence operations, and longer-term ideological influence, but also the deliberate encouragement of rigorous scholarship in domains where disinformation circulates widely—climate change being a salient example. She is the originator and a co-founder of the Global Climate Research Prize, and she has sustained long-standing policy engagement, including active service for more than fifteen years on a scientific advisory board in the defence sphere.
Group leader
Hannele Seeck
Current Areas of Research
Main internal collaboration partners at LUT, selected
Group members
Cristiane Melchior
Kari Suomalainen
Aino-Maria Ruggiero
Visa Penttilä
Merja Porttikivi
Niina Sormanen
Doctoral Researchers and Visiting Scholars
Visiting professors and other affiliated researchers
Partners from
Policy work (selected)
Current Projects (selected, examples)
Helsingin Sanomain Säätiö (Helingin Sanomat Foundation)
In collaboration with colleagues from the University of Cambridge and LSE, the project builds open-source tools that automatically connect users to existing fact-checks and warn them about manipulative content - bringing verification to people where they encounter information, rather than requiring them to seek it out.
Nordforsk
The overall aim of this project is to strengthen the preparedness against the full spectrum of biological threats; from natural, accidental, to deliberate, by increasing awareness and best practices for effective and harmonised total defence strategies.
JSPS Fellowship
LUT Internal Funding
Recent and upcoming events that the group members are participating in
Interested in becoming affiliated with the group?
Visiting Professors (on sabbatical from their home institutions)
- Please contact Professor Seeck directly, hannele.seeck@lut.fi
Postdoctoral Fellows
- We are currently accepting Marie Curie post-doctoral fellows: https://marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/actions/postdoctora…. If you are planning to apply, please contact the group during the application period.
- If you are interested in becoming a longer-term postdoctoral fellow with external funding (such as the Academy of Finland funding) that you intend to apply for, please contact the group well in advance DPS-lab@lut.fi.
- Visiting postdoctoral researchers, please contact DPS-lab@lut.fi
- Note that you are expected to bring your own funding in full and your research needs to fit to key research interests of the group.
Doctoral Students
- Potential Doctoral Researchers/PhD candidates: If you are interested in conducting PhD at LUT in Communication Sciences, Department of Social Sciences and in this research group, please contact us DPS-lab@lut.fi. Please note that the application period is continuous.
- However, please note that just during the past six months, the group has received over 160 applications from potential PhD students.
- For general PhD/doctoral studies related information please see: https://www.lut.fi/en/research/doctoral-school/doctoral-programme-engin… (then select social sciences).
- Visiting doctoral students: You may request a visitor position in our research group, but please note that due to limited supervision resources, we seldom take on visiting PhD students to the group.
MSc Students
- If you are interested in conducting your LUT MSc dissertation on the Lab’s core themes, please contact dps-lab@lut.fi. Occasionally, we may have a topic and and data available that can be used for a MSc thesis. Please attach your CV and a writing sample (e.g. essay, etc.) to your message and briefly explain your previous knowledge (courses) in this field.
Study programmes and courses associated with the Lab’s core themes
Master’s Programme in Global Communications and Clean Air, Water and Energy
