Workpackages

List of InVID workpackages

WP1: Project and Innovation Management

Project management encompasses contractual issues; administrative, technical and financial management; innovation management and the setup of the project’s Innovation Advisory Board; quality assurance, data and knowledge management; setup of the project’s external Ethics Board; communication within the project and communication between the project and the EC. The Project Coordinator CERTH will lead the project management, but will be assisted by the Innovation Manager, the Integration Manager, the members of the General Assembly and the WP leaders. The WP has the following objectives:

  • Ensure effective planning, implementation, coordination and achievement of the project activities, including timely production of deliverables and successful completion of the tasks.
  • Provide project structure and support to assist decision making, internal and external communications, encourage greater accountability and control, minimise risk, identify and exploit project related opportunities.
  • Foster innovation and guide the consortium in taking all the necessary steps for achieving the overall project objectives.

WP2: Media Selection and Analysis

This workpackage tackles the issue of filtering out from the large scale of social media being posted and shared every minute online those media items (images or videos) which have the most potential of being representative of a significant breaking news topic. Selected media subsequently undergo analysis, so as to extract metadata at the media level and, where appropriate, also at the media-fragment level. The result is a metadata file for each media item which can be used to support the media verification process.

WP3: Content Verification

This workpackage will build tools that assist news professionals in their content verification tasks. Such tools will facilitate and considerably speed up verification tasks that are currently carried out manually or are tedious due to the need for using a number of different services and applications that are not connected to each other. Content verification in InVID will rely on three fundamental services that will operate in parallel once a new piece of posted multimedia content (image, video) is provided as input by the end user:

  • Multimedia forensics, which will inform the end user on whether the video has been manipulated at a bitstream level (and hence cannot be considered authentic);
  • Identification of near-duplicate content, which will inform the end user on whether a posted image or video was reposted in the past (and is hence not original);
  • Contextual verification, which will inform the end user with respect to the credibility surrounding the publication of posted content (e.g. social media account who made the post, accompanying text) and its consistency (e.g. by crosschecking claimed with inferred location).

Each of the aforementioned services will produce an output, in the form of a verification report, quantifying the extent to which the content of interest is not to be trusted. More importantly, this output will be accompanied by supportive evidence that is interpretable by an end-user, e.g. in the case of the near-duplicate identification, the system will point the user to previous postings of the same content.

WP4: Rights Management

The objective of this work package is to deal with the copyright issues arising from the reuse of content in InVID, especially UGC. Copyright management in the digital era is becoming a very cumbersome and time-consuming task. Media owners and re-users find it increasingly difficult to scale their copyright management capabilities to keep track of all the media assets they manage, while the risks of misuse increase due to the fact that media distribution and remixing is becoming easier and easier thanks to digitalisation, the Internet, Social Networks, etc. These circumstances are pushing the industry to explore different ways to automate copyright processing. In this regards, InVID contribution is mainly related with the process UGC reuse, from contacting the asset owner to establishing the re-use terms and compensating the owner, through clarifying the rights status of the UGC in relation with content remixed. Thus, InVID defines a set of conceptual models, methodologies and tools that assist UGC re-users in this process. First of all, the Copyright Ontology is used to represent in an unambiguous and machine-actionable way rights statements, policies, contracts and licenses. InVID also models the workflow involving discovering the owner of an interesting piece of UGC, contacting the owner, setting a copyright negotiation framework and establishing the required rights agreements to reuse the asset. The framework will also take into account existing regulations related with copyright, especially those at the EU level though it will be also clarified to what extent it complies with other regulatory domains like UK or the USA. Moreover, the InVID platform will also take into account relevant EU regulations about privacy and data protection (Directive 95/46/EC) especially in relation with UGC providers.

In this sense, this WP will also define a set of data protection and privacy guidelines that also take into account ethical issues about protecting UGC providers of sensible content. These guidelines will also guarantee that liability of the InVID platform in relation with the mediated content is avoided to the maximum extent possible, making UGC providers liable for any issue related with unauthorised content being provided as part of UGC or other privacy or personal rights issues.

WP5: System Integration and Platform Development

WP5 will build the infrastructure to store and access the diverse types of content gathered in WP2 and verified in WP3 (in terms of veracity) and WP4 (in terms of intellectual property rights). For this purpose, WP5 will deliver a distributed, scalable, and integrated storage, indexing and retrieval component for social media metadata (authoritative and usergenerated), enriched with social network analyses, verification indicators, and rights management, providing journalistusers with all the data they need – accessible though intuitive information visualisations – to make an informed decision on social media news content.

WP6: Industrial Requirements and Application Development

The objective of WP6 is to identify the industrial requirements that guide all technical work in InVID, and develop the InVID applications/systems (Verification Application, UGC Management Systems integrating the Verification Application, Mobile Application and the UGC Management System integrating it) in response to these requirements and using the technologies and the platform developed in WPs 2 to 5. The main contribution is the Verification Application, which will then be integrated in the UGC Management Systems of Condat and APA-IT. The Verification Application will be usable (and exploitable) both as a stand-alone application and as part of the complete UGC Management Systems. In order to support field-based journalistic work by non-professional users, native app clients for iOS and Android will also be developed and integrated in a UGC Management System, to provide an easy way for users to register and upload videos combined with automatically (Geo, device-information) and manually added metadata. The industrial requirement specification and the application development will follow an agile process of short 3-month cycles, with functional and tested releases of the applications at the end of each such cycle, which has been defined for all the development work within InVID.

WP7: Pilots, Testing and User Feedback

In WP7 the technologies integrated in the InVID platform and applications will be tested and evaluated in various editorial cases and trials. This will be done with different user groups. The primary aim is to collect user feedback both on the tools and components themselves, their usability and appropriateness for various tasks, and the results of the system as a whole (e.g. in terms of reliability and accuracy). Using an iterative approach (up to 9 validation cycles), the feedback and results obtained from each cycle of the trials will be used to improve the subsequent versions of the applications, platform and components (this work will be carried out in respective technical WPs). Tests and evaluations will focus on video (breaking) news emerging from social networks and media web sites, as well as user generated content provided by a user community built by regional newspapers.

WP8: Exploitation and Dissemination

The first aim of this work package is to define an exploitation strategy for the tools and services developed in the InVID project to help media verifying video content and especially user generated videos. The second goal is to define a dissemination strategy to give a strong visibility to the project and to ensure that the results obtained are widely publicized within the media and web industry.