Christoph Lutz awarded NOK 12 million for DISTINCT project

NCIS co-director and professor Christoph Lutz has been awarded NOK 12 million from the Research Council of Norway through the prestigious FRIPRO scheme. The funding goes to his new project DISTINCT, short for Digital Status and Its Social and Technological Construction.

Christoph Lutz is a leading researcher in Europe on digital inequality and privacy. DISTINCT builds directly on this body of work, scaling it up to a new level:

"This research is timely as we see algorithmic systems taking an increasingly central role in governing social values. By analyzing the mechanisms behind digital status, we aim to provide the empirical evidence needed to ensure that digital transformation does not come at the cost of social fairness. Our goal is to offer actionable insights for different stakeholders, including policymakers, platform developers and fellow academics,” says Lutz.

The project investigates how digital status is created, how it is shaped by algorithms and platform design, and what consequences it has for inequality in society. A key focus will be generative on AI: do these systems reproduce existing social biases when they evaluate people's digital standing, or do they create entirely new ones?

The project runs from late summer 2026 to late summer 2030 and brings together an international team from BI, the University of Zurich, Leiden University, the University of Lausanne, Leipzig University, and HEC Paris.

We congratulate Christoph on this achievement and look forward to seeing where DISTINCT takes us.

Facts

• More information about FRIPRO 
• The funding comes through FRIPRO, the Research Council of Norway's flagship scheme for curiosity-driven, investigator-initiated research. FRIPRO grants are awarded through a highly competitive process and are reserved for projects of the highest international quality. An overview of the other funded research projects can be found in the official press release.