News

More than 1000 users of the InVID verification plugin

More than 1000 users of the InVID verification plugin

We are thrilled to inform you that there are now more than 1000 users of the InVID verification plugin! And lots of content that has been processed over the last months for debunking fake news!

We are inviting every single user to take the survey and give us feedback about the tool! Then, we promise to make it even better!

If you haven’t discovered the tool yet, get it for free from: http://www.invid-project.eu/verify

Survey about the InVID Verification Plugin

Take the survey about the verification plugin and help us improve the tool!

InVID at World Digital Content and IFRA Expo

InVID at World Digital Content and IFRA Expo

During three days, InVID project was demoed by Gerhard Rudinger (APA-IT) and Denis Teyssou (AFP) in the startup space of the World Digital Content and IFRA Expo in Messe Berlin, the traditional yearly event of the press and publishing industry organized by WAN-IFRA, the World association of newspapers and publishers.

The event was the occasion to showcase the InVID project and the InVID Verification Plugin (a.k.a. “Fake video news debunker”) to executives from media houses like News UK (“The Times”, “The Sun”, “Sunday Times”), Kyodo News (Japan), Roularta (Belgium), German newspapers and so on.

InVID was also presented on the main conference stage in the panel “Preparing for the 2020s”, where Denis Teyssou demonstrated the InVID Verification Plugin in front of more than 100 media professionals (see indicative images below):

  1. on a Russian video re-used out of context to create a xenophobic climate during the French presidential election;
  2. on the Eduardo Martins fake war photographer affair, with a new feature aiming to detect pictures which have been mirrored;
  3. on a North Korea picture which shows evidence to have been tampered.
Mr. Denis Teyssou from AFP, demonstrating the InVID Verification Plugin in the

Mr. Denis Teyssou demonstrating the InVID Verification Plugin to the participants of the panel “Preparing for the 2020s” of WAN-IFRA.

Indicative view of the audience

Indicative view of the audience of the panel “Preparing for the 2020s” of WAN-IFRA.

The given presentation can be seen in the following:

In summary, the WAN-IFRA event was a very good opportunity to disseminate the InVID results and to raise awareness about the InVID project. Amid a general concern about fake news, the project attracted attention and was highlighted by WAN-IFRA on its editor’s blog: https://blog.wan-ifra.org/2017/10/12/publishers-share-fact-checking-tools-and-initiatives-to-restore-trust-in-media

The InVID product portfolio at I3 Investors Meeting for Media Innovators

InVID at Investors Meeting for Media Innovators

Dr. Lyndon Nixon from MODUL Technology, presented the InVID product portfolio at I3 Investors Meeting for Media Innovators that took place in London, UK, on 5th of October 2017.

The main goal of the InVID project “to provide journalists with the tools they need to verify the authenticity and trustworthiness of online videos from news events” was initially highlighted by Dr. Nixon. Following the main integrated technologies of the project, namely the InVID Dashboard, the InVID Verification Plugin and the InVID Verification Application, were presented to an audience comprised by members of other ICT-19 projects, start-ups and investors.

In the video below, you can see the part where the InVID product portfolio was discussed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV3Amgby5vo&t=143m15s

The slides of this presentation are also available.

New release of InVID Verification Plugin

New release of InVID Verification Plugin

A new release of InVID verification plugin was made on October 3, 2017. This new updated version of the tool contains the following features.

  • A permanent feedback mechanism that allows our users to get in contact with us in order to share how they use the tool, problems they may have, questions about the applied analysis, as well as ideas for future improvements.
The feedback mechanism of the InVID Verification Plugin

The feedback mechanism of the InVID Verification Plugin

  • A survey to gather the users’ opinion about the plugin; this survey takes only a few minutes to complete and it will help us to provide you with better tools!
The integrated survey about the use of the InVID Verification Plugin

The integrated survey about the use of the InVID Verification Plugin

  • A new filter that allows users to deal with fake mirrored images. The case of the fake war photographer Eduardo Martins which was reported in early September 2017 puts in evidence that reverse image search engines often fail to detect mirrored images. This use case gave us the idea to propose a tool to overcome such fake images. In the Magnifier feature, there is now a flip filter that allows you to mirror the image before sending it to Google Images. The generated mirrored image can be also downloaded to the user’s PC. See the example bellow and watch the video tutorial on the InVID channel, to see how to proceed.
Magnifier tool for image mirroring

Magnifier tool for image mirroring

  • Finally, the same Magnifier feature now support links to images stored in Dropbox and Google Drive (please make sure to have a link ending with “view?usp=sharing”).

Get the latest version of the InVID Verification Plugin from here!

InVID at FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress 2017

InVID at FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress 2017

The theme for the 2017 FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress, to be held in Berlin from 04-06 October 2017, will be Media Intelligence and the New Paradigm of Brand Communication, including a special session on “How to Analyze in an Alternative Facts World”.

Prof. Arno Scharl from webLyzard technology will present results of the InVID project as part of his keynote presentation on “Automated Rumor Detection and Visualization”, with a special focus on the project’s prototypical applications – the InVID Verification App, the InVID Verification Plugin, and the InVID Visual Analytics Dashboard including its real-time story detection and streamgraph visualization components (see also https://invid.weblyzard.com).

The InVID technologies at ACM Multimedia 2017

The InVID technologies at ACM Multimedia 2017

The InVID technologies for media discovery and verification will be presented at the ACM Multimedia Conference 2017 that will take place on October 23-27, 2017, at Mountain View, CA USA.

Dr. Lyndon Nixon from MODUL Technology GmbH will present the latest developments of the InVID project on detecting news stories from Twitter streams and using those stories to collect automatically relevant videos from social networks. Specifically, Dr. Nixon will address the need to first find good candidate videos from the haystack of social networks and explain how the InVID Dashboard (see screenshot below) can be used to browse news stories and relevant video posted about those stories, helping journalists more easily identify candídates for verification.

Screenshot of the developed InVID Dashboard

Screenshot of the developed InVID Dashboard

Following, Dr. Vasileios Mezaris from Information Technologies Institute of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas will focus on the necessity to evaluate the trustworthiness of user-generated videos published on social networks, aiming either to verify their authenticity and veracity or to debunk fake videos. In this context, Dr. Mezaris will demonstrate the use and functionality of the InVID Verification Plugin (see screenshot below) for assessing the reliability of a user-generated video, by investigating the originality, the contextual information, the existence of potential tampering, and the relation to other newsworthy videos.

Screenshot of the Magnifier tool of the developed InVID Verification Plugin

Screenshot of the Magnifier tool of the developed InVID Verification Plugin

These talks will be part of the 1st International Workshop on Multimedia Verification that will be held in conjunction with the ACM Multimedia Conference 2017.

 

InVID at Investors Meeting for Media Innovators

InVID at Investors Meeting for Media Innovators

On 5th October 2017, Dr Lyndon Nixon will represent InVID at Investors Meeting for Media Innovators organised by the Support Action I3. Bringing together EU research projects from the ICT-19 call, media startups and investors, Dr Nixon will be available to demonstrate and explain InVID’s unique toolkit for verifying online video, starting with a media collection pipeline through annotation and analysis to forensic analysis. The media discovery and verification functionalities are intuitively put into the hands of journalists, news editors and other media professionals through a browser-based Dashboard, a Verification Plug-in and a Verification Application.

In the one day event, InVID hopes to learn more about how its innovative services and tools could be used to support other media startups (also outside of the verification domain) as well as understand what investment opportunities exist for future sustainability and exploitation of InVID project results.

The InVID Verification App in the Innovation Radar Prize 2017 of the EU Commission

The InVID Verification App has been short-listed for the Innovation Radar Prize 2017 of the EU Commission. The Innovation Radar initiative of the European Commission is actively identifying high potential EU-funded innovations and innovators and seeking to help them get their innovation “out of the lab” and into (or at least closer to) the market.

This application has been developed by Condat, to support journalists during the verification of user-generated videos. It integrates several tools and services of project partners CERTH, MODUL, EXO MAKINA and UdL, that allow the user to analyse the source, content, location, date and rights of the video, and relies on domain knowledge of project partners AFP and DW. Further details about this technology can be found here.

It would be great, if you could help us to improve the chances of the InVID Verification App to win the Innovation Radar Prize by VOTING here: https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/tech-society/condat

Screenshot of the InVID Verification App, showing the different tools for assessing the authenticity and veracity user-generated videos.

InVID at Brussels DisinfoLab event

InVID Verification Plugin at Brussels DisinfoLab event

The InVID project and the developed InVID Verification Plugin was presented on Thursday 14th of September at the Brussels DisinfoLab, which has been organized by Saper Vedere, a consulting startup specialized in social networks analysis. At this event, whose sub-headline is «a framework to fight fake news?», various initiatives to debunk fake news were presented from several institutions, labs and research institutes.

Denis Teyssou, the InVID Innovation Manager, demonstrated the use and functionality of the InVID Verification Plugin on recent fake videos published on various social networks. His presentation is available at the InVID SlideShare channel and the project website.

Further details about the context, the aim, the presented items and the next steps of the Brussels DisinfoLab event can be found here.

InVID releases its fake video news debunker for Firefox and provides the code in open source under MIT licence

InVID verification plugin open beta release

The European Horizon 2020 project InVID (In Video Veritas) is releasing this Wednesday (12/7) in open beta the Firefox version of its plugin to help journalists save time in their verification processes and debunk more efficiently fake video news. At the same time, the plugin code is published and shared on GitHub (https://github.com/invideu/invid-verification-plugin) in open source with a MIT license. (The plugin code is the same on Chrome and Firefox).

The InVID plugin which was released on Chrome browser on the 3rd of July at a First Draft Meeting at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France can now be downloaded at the bottom of this page by Firefox users, on each available operating system.

The InVID plugin allows to get contextual information on YouTube and Facebook videos, to fragment videos from several platforms into keyframes, to query reverse image search engines like Google, Yandex and Baidu, to magnify pictures to read details, to read metadata and to apply forensic filters to detect alterations of an image, as well as searching on Twitter by time range up to the minute.

The plugin is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux users. To install the plugin, after downloading and unpacking the zip file, simply drag & drop the created XPI file in a new tab of your Firefox browser.

A video tutorial / demo is available on the InVID Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/nmgbFODPiBY

As usual, we welcome your feedback at: invid-verification-plugin@iti.gr

The InVID team