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At our project consortium meeting in Thessaloniki in February 2024 we conducted a number of interviews with project partners and asked them to summarise and highlight some of their work. Here's DW's Jochen Spangenberg talking to Luca Cuccovillo of Fraunhofer IDMT. 

Following a call to action by the European Commission requesting feedback on the systemic risks related to electoral processes, individuals from a number of vera.ai consortium partners sketched out their views on the matter. In this article, some of the contributions made are recapped and shared. The full submission to the EC is attached, too.

For over 18 months now, the vera.ai consortium has been doing research, developed new tools and spread its results. In mid-March 2024 it was time to publish a set of three deliverables that present and summarize the research and development work that has been done in the respective work packages so far. Here, you can find more about them.

At our project consortium meeting in Thessaloniki in February 2024 we conducted a number of interviews with project partners and asked them to summarise and highlight some of their work. Here's DW's Anna Schild talking to Richard Rogers of the University of Amsterdam. 

Project partner ONTOTEXT is working on a variety of multilingual matters, using AI in this context. In this article, the Bulgaria-based company outlines how state-of-the-art AI models for multilingual entity linking enable working with concepts in 100+ languages, and how this helps to connect and analyze linguistically diverse content.

A team of vera:ai researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT), Germany and the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH-ITI), Greece  have developed a new synthetic speech detection dataset. Find out more why they did it and what this contains.

The EU Horizon Europe co-funded projects TITAN, AI4Media, AI4Trust and vera.ai have joined forces - several project participants co-wrote a White Paper entitled "Generative AI and Disinformation: Recent Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities." It takes a look at past and present developments and raises issues for the future in this highly relevant field.

Co-hosted with the ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR’24) that takes place in Phuket, Thailand, from 10-13 June 2024, vera:ai project partners are co-organising the 3rd ACM International Workshop on Multimedia AI against Disinformation (MAD’24) in Phuket, Thailand. Here's more, including the respective Call for Papers.

This post explains the basics behind a paper entitled “VERITE: a robust benchmark for multimodal misinformation detection accounting for unimodal bias”, published in the International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval (IJMIR). It has been authored by researchers of the mever group at project partner CERTH-ITI.

A project by vera.ai, entitled “The Persistence and Resilience of Misinformation in the Face of Fact Checking,” was facilitated by Fabio Giglietto, Massimo Terenzi ( UNIURB) and Richard Rogers (UvA) at the Digital Media Initiative Winter School at the University of Amsterdam. We are pleased to share with you the results.

The EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing) conference is one of the top NLP conferences. KInIT researchers Róbert Móro and Ján Čegiň presented three full papers at this prestigious event. Here’s more about what they did, and the related works.

A new paper that includes recent findings of disinformation analysis has been published in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Social Media. It is entitled “Cracking Open the European Newsfeed”, co-authored by vera.ai team members based at University of Urbino “Carlo Bo”, Italy. The paper contributes to the ongoing effort to describe and quantify the quality of information shared on large social media platforms.

It's that time of the year again .... 2023 is nearing its end. That is why we would like to wish all our friends and followers a time for reflection and especially health and happiness. May the year ahead be a good one - and let's all strive to make it a better place - and do so in whichever way we can.

Would you like to meet some of the VERA.AI team members? If so: don’t miss the chance and look for us in Nuremberg from 4-7 December 2023  at the IEEE Workshop in Information Forensics and Security.

Who is behind vera.ai? Meet the people and teams that make up the vera.ai project. Check-out interview #10 Kamila Koronska, University of Amsterdam.

Dataset of 9.000 AI-generated images described in the paper "Synthbuster: Towards Detection of Diffusion Model Generated Images" (Quentin Bammey, 2023, Open Journal of Signal Processing).

In this article, the vera.ai consortium provides a series of policy recommendations aimed at enhancing data access tools, streamlining application processes, and promoting transparency in the use of social media data for academic and investigative purposes. Recommendations are largely based on past experiences and learnings to date.

It was the 15th of September 2022 when the vera.ai project officially started and sent 14 partners from across Europe on the mission to develop and build trustworthy AI solutions in the fight against disinformation. What happened in the first year of this journey? What has been accomplished, and where is it all going? Deutsche Welle's Anna Schild looks back at an active year and highlights a selection of achievements.

Many researchers attempt to develop tools that support journalists and fact-checkers in their verification tasks with a variety of tools and services. One such tool is the Database of Known Fakes (DBKF), which is being developed and further enhanced in vera.ai by Bulgarian company ontotext. Here's more about it.

Our innovation manager Denis Teyssou (AFP) conducted a 50 minutes dedicated breakout session named AI vs disinformation: the vera.ai project: enhancing the InVID-WeVerify plugin. Around 40 participants, including well-known fact-checkers like Craig Silverman (ProPublica), attended the session in-person. The talk was recorded for online participants on the Global Fact 10 website.

Achieving generalisation is one of the fundamental challenges in machine and deep learning methods. In an effort to contribute to the investigation of such an important challenge, the MeVer group performed a study on the setting of detecting synthetic images across different concept classes, i.e. synthetic image detection in a cross-concept scenario.

Here's a video recording of a talk by Fabio Giglietto of the University of Urbino, given in June 2023 at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Topic: using OpenAI models to identify the most salient topics circulated via Facebook links in the run-up to the Italian general elections.

On 29 June 2023, the conference "Meet the Future of AI: Countering Sophisticated & Advanced Disinformation" took place at VRT in Brussels. It was organised by Horizon Europe research projects AI4Media, AI4Trust, TITAN, vera.ai and the European Commission. The event was attended by 90 people on-site, while around 180 joined online. Here's a recap.

On Friday 30 June, vera.ai will be featured in Seoul (Korea), in a dedicated breakout session of the leading worldwide gathering of fact-checkers: Global Fact 10, which takes place under the auspices of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).

The event “Meet the future of AI” is coming closer, scheduled to take place on 29 June 2023. You can still register - but we are filling up fast (for in-person participation - no limits in term of numbers for participation online). Here, we publish the detailed agenda, so you know what you can expect. 

The EU co-funded projects AI4Media and vera.ai co-organized a joint workshop on Multimedia AI against Disinformation (MAD’23), which took place in Thessaloniki on 12 June 2023. Here's a recap and outlook.

As a part of the vera.ai project, the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies and the University of Sheffield co-participated at SemEval 2023 – the most prestigious data challenge within the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Both partners proposed winning solutions for predicting the credibility of text contained in articles found on the web.

A novel methodological approach designed and tested by the University of Urbino team aims to identify, categorize, and label similar political narratives, thereby measuring their exposure on social media. Initially, this innovative technique was tested on political links shared on Facebook in the lead-up to two Italian general elections. Find out more in this post.

Who is behind vera.ai? Meet the people and teams that make up the vera.ai project. Check-out interview  #9 Luisa Verdoliva, University Federico II of Naples, Italy.

Who is behind vera.ai? Meet the people and teams that make up the vera.ai project. Check-out interview #8 Team of University of Urbino Carlo Bo.

Who is behind vera.ai? Meet the people and teams that make up the vera.ai project. Check-out interview #7 with Alexandre Alaphilippe, EU DisinfoLab.

The “Meet the future of AI” event is coming closer! You can now register for the conference that takes place on 29 June 2023 and is brought to an interested audience by the Horizon Europe research projects AI4media, AI4Trust, TITAN and vera.ai - in cooperation with the European Commission. Secure your place - virtual or online - now! 

Who is behind vera.ai? Meet the people and teams that make up the vera.ai project. Check out the interview with Stefanos-Iordanis Papadopoulos who works for CERTH-ITI.

Who is behind vera.ai? Meet the people and teams that make up the vera.ai project.#5 Ivan Srba, KInIT (Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies).

Who is behind vera.ai? Meet the people and teams that make up the vera.ai project. Check out the interview with Luca Cuccovillo,  Fraunhofer IDMT. 

In this final video of the short interview series recorded in Perugia at the International Journalism Festival 2023, Felix M. Simon of the Oxford Internet Institute talked to DW's Jochen Spangenberg about the role generative AI is likely to play on the disinformation and verification sphere.

Who is behind vera.ai? Meet the people and teams that make up the vera.ai project. Check out the interview with Miguel Colom from Centre Borelli (ENS Paris-Saclay, France).

Maarten Schenk is co-founder of Belgian fact-checking outlet Lead Stories. He is very active in the field of debunking. At the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, DW's Jochen Spangenberg asked him about his views on how Artificial Intelligence will impact the production as well as spreading of disinformation, and what this means for fact-checkers like him.

At the International Journalism Festival 2023 in Perugia DW's Jochen Spangenberg interviewed Nic Newman of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism to find out what he thought would be the impact of recent advances in Artificial Intelligence on the disinformation and verification sphere. Watch the short video to hear what Nic had to say.

Who is behind vera.ai? Meet the people and teams that make up the vera.ai project. Check out the interview with Olga Papadopoulou from CERTH, project coordinator of vera.ai.

Meet us at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia from 20-22 April, one of the primary events in the world in which the journalism and media community come together and  discuss a great variety of aspects related to the past, present and future of the media industry

Eneya Georgieva, product owner of Ontotext's disinformation-related products, showcased the Searchable Graph of Enriched Debunks, DBKF (also known as Database of Known Fakes), at the EBU’s Data Technology Seminar 2023 onsite in Geneva.

Who is behind vera.ai? Meet the people and teams that make up the vera.ai project. Check out the interview with Akis Papadopoulos from CERTH, project coordinator of vera.ai.

Project coordinator Olga Papadopoulou, CERTH, presented vera.ai and the MeVer toolset at this year's EBU data technology seminar held in Geneva and online. Here's a summary of what Olga presented and insights she shared with the audience.

Following the announcement of the date for our summer event “Meet the future of AI” (29 June 2023), we can now provide a preliminary programme. In short: the day focusses on a variety of relevant issues and challenges around generative AI (Artificial Intelligence). In particular, we will discuss and raise various aspects surrounding the tackling or countering of disinformation in this relatively new environment.

On 29 June 2023, the European Commission and four EU projects dealing with Artificial Intelligence and the countering of disinformation are hosting a one-day event in Brussels. Topic: the impact of AI on creating as well as tackling disinformation. Included: the state of play, regulatory aspects as well as practical insights from ongoing work and initiatives. 

Participatory Design actively involves relevant stakeholders in the design process. This is exactly what we are planning to do in the vera.ai project: Within six sessions, starting in March 2023, we will elaborate and bring together user needs and design prototypes.

At the “Digital Methods Winter School and Data Sprint 2023” vera.ai project partner Ontotext coordinated a project that aimed to engage participants in providing an analysis on how to identify different elements in the spread of disinformation, and come up with ideas of how to reduce disinformation dissemination through insights and tools. A key question: How to model the spread of disinformation by identifying its components and the connection between various instances?

A team of CERTH and DW researchers are currently undertaking a study that uses Artificial Intelligence to detect gruesome imagery in order to support trauma prevention. If you are exposed to potentially disturbing imagery as part of your work, the team would be most grateful if you could participate in the study by filling out a questionnaire.

It is common sense that countering disinformation in all its shapes is most effective with united forces. Therefore, it is one designated aim of vera.ai to create a network of related EU-funded projects and beyond. If you see an opportunity for collaboration or cooperation, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Look no further to discover how technology (ChatGPT) can be used to summarize a long and complex scientific paper about technology, namely generative language models. Put differently: ChatGPT produced a summarization text about the applied technology's underlying potential risks and benefits. Supported by some manual edits and a review by the article's author. 

In this piece we present findings from a study on current fact-checking archiving practices and Facebook post removals using the “War in Ukraine” dataset of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO). Insights presented here come from a project that was carried out as part of the Digital Methods Initiative Winter School and Data Sprint 2023.

Here's another project that was carried out during the 2023 Winter School organised by the University of Amsterdam’s Digital Methods Initiative (DMI). The work of this team, coordinated by the hosts themselves, among other tested a "detection method” that is to allow fact-checkers for faster detection of “post-truth spaces” and verification of actors that spread (in this case pro-Kremlin) propaganda on social networks.

During the 2023 Winter School organised by the University of Amsterdam’s Digital Methods Initiative, a Uni URB team, led by by Fabio Giglietto, carried out a project that dealt with (mis)information dynamics in online networks in the context of the war in Ukraine. Here’s what they found.

Journalists, investigators and researchers who have to analyze and verify digital content often encounter highly disturbing and  potentially traumatizing material, e.g. when reporting from war or conflict. In this article, we look at ways to protect investigators from secondary trauma and give some tips and advice designed to limit negative consequences. All this is to support mental well-being when dealing with gruesome material online.

In June 2023, you are invited to the Workshop on Multimedia AI against Disinformation (MAD'23). It is co-hosted with the ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval and brought to you by AI4Media and vera.ai. Join us in June in Thessaloniki, Greece. 

On 17 January 2023 from 2-3 pm the EBU is hosting a webinar in which vera.ai will be introduced and community views will be canvassed. We present how user needs of newsroom professionals and fact-checkers are to be included in the project, and which role you can play in all this.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has been going on since late February 2022. Access to the region, especially combat zones, by independent reporters is still limited. To assess the situation on the ground partially depends on content posted in social networks. A key challenge: gaining access to relevant material, verifying and archiving it before it’s gone.

We wish you - all our friends, followers, business partners, associates,  and whoever else you are -  reading these lines - a lovely holiday period. 

The University of Amsterdam (UvA), Department of Media Studies, is organising a Digital Methods Winter School 2023 from 9-13 January. Topic: ’The use and misuse of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)’. Here's a call for participation. 

We are very happy to have launched the vera.ai website. All our news and resources can be found under one roof, at the destination www.veraai.eu. Ready for takeoff - and happy surfing.

The European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) and the so-called EDMO Hubs are the EU’s primary initiatives in the fight against disinformation. This article provides an overview and insights into existing links between EDMO, the Hubs and vera.ai.

In this press release, the University of Sheffield one of vera.ai's project partners writes about its role in the project and provides some context. 

Our colleagues from AFP have produced a short video in which we show you how you can continue using Google Reverse Image Search and Google Lens with our verification plugin.

One of the assets of the vera.ai project is to be able to build new AI-tools, and enhance existing AI-features.

Bulgarian solutions development company Sirma AI (trading as Ontotext) will continue work on a so-called database of debunked contents.

On 12 October 2022 Eva Kaili, Vice President of the European Parliament, invited an interested audience to a session hosted by her in Brussels.

In this press release, the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) informs about the start of vera.ai and invites its members to get involved.

Project partner ATC gives an overview of vera.ai and its specific role in coordinating the development of vera.ai’s user-facing tools.

From 27-28 September 2022 the vera.ai consortium met for its official kick-off meeting in Marathon near Athens, Greece. It was a fruitful exchange and start to the project. Most enjoyable: seeing many colleagues in person. 

With vera.ai, Deutsche Welle aims to continue its work on countering disinformation from forerunner projects such as InVID and WeVerify.

How Slovakian research institute KInIT, dedicated to intelligent technology research, aims to work in and benefit from its work in vera.ai. Plus a project overview.

In this press release, French news agency and vera.ai project partner AFP writes about its role in the project and provides some context. 

15th of September 2022 was not only the official start of the vera.ai project, but also the kick-off for presenting it to interested stakeholders.