On Thursday 14 November 2024 we launched our presence on BlueSky, a federated social network that in many ways resembles old Twitter (not so much X as it is called now, and after it had been purchased by Elon Musk and was turned into a rather toxic platform). We’ll be posting more and more on BlueSky and see how things develop there - also keeping a very close eye on what happens on X.

This is the second edition in our webinar series organised by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). It features Luca Cuccovillo and Milica Gerhardt of Fraunhofer IDMT who talk about and showcase their vera.ai work which focusses on tools, techniques and their research work related to the analysis of audio content - another activity that is to support in countering disinformation.

Here's a webinar recording of a session that took place on 11 September 2024, organised by the EBU. It features Symeon Papadopoulos (CERTH) and Luisa Verdoliva (University Federico II of Naples), who explain the advances, tools and challenges of synthetic image detection – a technology that tackles one of the biggest challenges in fact-checking, namely the proliferation of AI-generated or AI-modified images. Follow on to view the recording.

A lot in vera.ai centers around data and code. In other words: the dealing with data, its analysis, experimentation, and more. In October 2024 we have started to bring together and make available all code that a) was created in and b) is used by vera.ai members in one central destination on the project website. This includes direct links to respective repositories - in most cases GitHub.  

On 14 September 2024, vera.ai completed its second project year. Reason enough for Ontotext's Nedelina Mitankina to look back on a year of activities, as well as look ahead at what is to come. In her contribution, Nedelina portrays in particular the work carried out in relation to the so-called Database of Known Fakes that can support factcheckers and verification experts alike. In focus in particular: entity linking and event extraction.

The MeVer team of CERTH-ITI was at the Thessaloniki International Fair. Team members presented and showcased their work on synthetic media detection that is being developed in the vera.ai project.

The KInIT research team thoroughly investigated capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate disinformation. In the following summary, they describe novel findings that their research revealed.

Meet vera.ai at the upcoming International Broadcasting Convention (IBC), 13-16 September 2024, in Amsterdam. You can find us in Hall 14 where the all-new IBC AI Tech Zone is introduced at this year’s event. The AI Tech Zone will be bustling with industry leaders and visionaries eager to explore how AI is transforming media and entertainment. Among them, vera.ai will showcase the cutting edge tools developed to enhance verification and combat disinformation.

The present report revisits the Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour (CIB) detection tree developed by EU DisinfoLab in 2021. It streamlines four branches of CIB into one comprehensive document and thoroughly examines their current status alongside the CIB definition and AI technologies' impact.