This first week of September saw the launch of AI4media, a new and unique European network dedicated to advancing AI solutions for the media and trusted AI. Now that AI technologies are beginning to have a real impact on the world of media and journalism, we’re really pleased to be part of this project. It will allow us to explore the next level of journalistic needs in the area of verification and disinformation detection, related AI functionalities as well as important ethical frameworks for the deployment of AI in news organisations. These are just some aspects of our use case that we run in cooperation with our long-term technology partner Athens Technology Center (ATC) for the next 4 years.
Due to the Corona crisis, there’s still no way to catch up with us in person, which is unfortunate. However, a lot of interesting events have gone virtual, so you can at least see us live on a computer screen every now and then. For example at the upcoming Czech media conference “Challenges of Journalism in the 21st Century – Automated Journalism and AI Journalism.”
We’ve compiled a comprehensive overview of digital games trying to advance media and information literacy (MIL) – with a focus on verification, fact-checking, and resilience to disinformation.
Great news from the world of HLT (that’s human language technology): In the scope of the GoURMET project, our partners at the BBC have completed a very useful tool called GoURMET translate. It helps non-expert users translate text from and into a number of low-resource languages – currently Amharic, Bulgarian, Gujarati, Kyrgyz, Serbian, Swahili and Turkish. (more…)
Still from a vertical tracking shot of Poppelsdorfer Schloss in Bonn – or just the kind of footage we need for our 3D design pipeline
“What kind of video footage can we best rehash for digital 3D reconstruction?” – that’s one of the main questions we’ve been exploring in the V4Design project. Our aim is to train innovative photogrammetry algorithms, i.e.: to automatically turn multi-perspective 2D video shots of an object (e.g. an iconic building) into a decent 3D version of that thing. Over the course of the project, we’ve evaluated all kinds of archived footage. Initial results were disappointing, but once we started looking for material in the right place, we actually discovered a very promising approach. (more…)
Are you a musician, photographer, video producer, digital content manager or legal consultant in the media industry? Make sure you don’t miss the upcoming week of demos, presentations and talks hosted by the Bloomen consortium. (more…)
The “tourist guy” pic, allegedly taken on top of the World Trade Center in NYC just seconds before the 9/11 attacks, is a classic example of a sensational, fabricated image circulated to millions of internet users, then via email.
Misleading news, doctored visuals, disguised propaganda: The spread of digital mis- and disinformation has become a major problem over the last years, and it looks like the Corona pandemic has led to yet another peak. What better time to start a new verification project: KID, kicked-off in April 2020, will help counter the “infodemic” by fostering media and information literacy (MIL) and exploring artificial intelligence (AI) tools to improve verification processes. (more…)
For more than three years we learnt how to fly. We flew far and high, but we also had some crashes (fortunately, nobody was hurt). In the H2020 Research and Innovation Action MULTIDRONE, we developed a platform for autonomous drone flights and tested this platform in experimental media productions. Here’s a quick review of the project that was successfully completed with an excellent review in February 2020. (more…)
Rules are in place to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus. One of them is called “social distancing” which helps to stop the transmission of Covid-19. What are the rules concerning Coronavirus information online? (more…)
Last month, DW participated in the swihack in Bern/Switzerland, hosted by SWI swissinfo.ch. Kay Macquarrie (of DW Innovation) and Elisabetta Tollardo (DW’s Head of Infographics) joined journalists, designers, developers and linguists, from the BBC, SWI, and NZZ to tackle some of the challenges faced by multilingual newsrooms. Participants spent two days developing solutions and better tools – ideally with an open source concept. In this post, we’re documenting the great work done by Kay’s and Elisabetta’s teams. (more…)
