WHO IS BEHIND VERA.AI?

Meet: Olga Papadopoulou

 

With the interview format WHO IS BEHIND VERA.AI? we subsequently present the people who make up the project, their role within vera.ai as well as their views on challenges, trends and visions for the projects' outcomes.

Who are you and what is your role within vera.ai?

I am Olga Papadopoulou member of the Media Analysis, Verification and Analysis (MeVer) group at CERTH-ITI in Thessaloniki. CERTH is coordinator of the vera.ai project and my role is project manager. You can find me on google scholar profile and LinkedIn.

Olga Papadopoulou

What challenges and trends do you currently see regarding disinformation analysis and AI supported verification tools and services (and what will you do about it, if anything)?

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, the fields of creating, spreading and countering disinformation are like a game of cat and mouse especially, with the advent of AI generated models. Models to detect manipulated media are constantly developed and evolving, while at the same time new types of manipulation emerge, which then cannot be detected by these models. 

Another issue that concerns me is that synthetic images and deep fakes are publicly available to all users through software such as FakeApp, Reface and DeepFaceLab, posing risks of being used by people not only for fun but also for malicious activities.

At this point, I am happy to be part of the multidisciplinary consortium of the vera.ai project that brings together expertise from different fields and will do its best to develop tools that will help protect the community from disinformation.

What is your 2025 vision of your contributions/outcomes within the scope of vera.ai?

Ideally, I would envision a world without disinformation! 

However, being realistic, I hope that the MeVer team, which I am a part of, will have managed to make a significant contribution for combating disinformation with the tools they have developed/improved within the vera.ai project. I hope journalists and fact-checkers will benefit from our tools and be able to deliver more reliable news, while addressing and removing unreliable information.

What makes you happy?

I love coffee, coffee makes me happy. But for some time I have to stay away from it and it makes me a little sad and sleepy.

 

Author: Olga Papadopoulou (CERTH)

Editor: Anna Schild (DW)

vera.ai is co-funded by the European Commission under grant agreement ID 101070093, and the UK and Swiss authorities. This website reflects the views of the vera.ai consortium and respective contributors. The EU cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained herein.