As part of the 4th edition of +RAIN, the AI film festival organized by Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona (June 14-17, 2026), two keynote addresses will be given on June 15. The event will take place at Pompeu Fabra University’s Poblenou Campus, will be conducted in English, and admission is free with prior registration through the +RAIN website.
Within the “Research” section, at 10:45 a.m., Christian Katzenbach, Professor at the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen, will give a lecture in English entitled “Bringing Generative AI into Being: Controversies, Corporate Power and Creative Work.”
At 12:45 pm, linguist Veronika Solopova, specializing in digital communication and large-scale language models, from the Technical University of Berlin, will give a presentation on the topic “The Evolution of Propaganda from Film to AI.”
Christian Katzenbach is a professor at the Center for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen and heads the “Platform Governance, Media and Technology” laboratory. In this context, he investigates the interrelationships between communication, technology, and politics within the framework of the digitalization of society. His areas of expertise include the conceptual and empirical analysis of internet and platform regulation and governance, the role of data, algorithms, and infrastructures in the organization of social communication, as well as the discourses and regulation of artificial intelligence.
Veronika Solopova works at the Technical University of Berlin and is a researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). After studying linguistics at the National University I.I. Mechnikov, who studied at Odesa (Ukraine) and the University of Granada (Spain), specialized in natural language processing in large-scale language models. In 2024, she received her PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin with a dissertation entitled “Hybrid AI systems for Automated Content Moderation and Analysis.” She has published work on social media moderation and analysis, as well as on topics such as hate speech, propaganda, and the detection of coordinated campaigns (shitstorms).