AURORA · Advanced User-centric, Trustworthy and Privacy-preserving AI-powered Search Engine

The European Green Deal aims to build a resource-efficient, competitive EU economy with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, clean energy and sustainable industries. Achieving this requires quick and reliable access to information on climate change, energy production, and technological developments. AI-powered search engines (AIPSEs) like Perplexity, can automatically retrieve information from multiple sources and deliver synthesized answers to users—saving them time browsing various websites. However, AIPSEs are still in their infancy and face critical security challenges, including generating biased or malicious responses, privacy leaks, and limited research in this area. For instance, Google’s AI Overviews generated dangerous responses like suggesting user eat rocks and glue (2024), and attackers can trick AIPSE into citing malicious content from phishing websites. Some AIPSEs track user histories for personalization, raising privacy risks; notably, a ChatGPT glitch exposed users' private conversations (2023).AURORA (Advanced User-centric, tRustwOrthy and pRivacy-preserving AI-powered search engine) is my proposal to mitigate these challenges, which aims to develop a user-centric AIPSE that provides trustworthy responses while protecting user privacy, and adhering to GDPR and EU AI Act. AURORA includes: 1). a user study on how users perceive malicious responses generated by existing AIPSEs, to guide user-centric design (WP1); 2). a multi-agent debate model with ML-based filters to automatically block fabricated and malicious content (WP2), which is expected to block around 90% of malicious sources, and to reduce hallucinations by about 10%; 3). a local differential privacy scheme to protect user data (WP3). By preventing the spread of misinformation, blocking malicious responses, and protecting privacy, AURORA enables policymakers, researchers, and citizens to make informed decisions about energy, environmental policies, and sustainable practices.