MU presents new research identifying fake news at the European Union's ICT 2018

Professors Arno Scharl and Lyndon Nixon of the Department of New Media Technology represented MODUL University Vienna last week at ICT 2018, the flagship event for EU-funded research and innovation in the area of information and communication technology (ICT).

Due to the Austrian EU presidency, this year the event was hosted at the Austria Center Vienna and brought together around 6,300 international delegates under the topic "Digital Transformation of Society and Industry".

Fake news is a significant problem for society and democracy today, given the ease it can spread on social networks and the means available to easily fake an image or video.

The "In Video Veritas" has been tackling the challenge of identifying manipulated or misleading video online and producing a toolkit which journalists and newsrooms can use to find and check videos posted to social networks such as Twitter, YouTube or DailyMotion.

Professors Scharl and Nixon collaborated with European partners in InVID to support the task of news story detection, social media video retrieval and annotation.

Based on the webLyzard Web intelligence platform of MU Vienna, a Web-based visual analytics dashboard presents users with current news stories and associated video content. The dashboard is publicly available at invid.weblyzard.com.

Successful European-funded research continues in the Department of New Media Technology. ReTV is a new project that leverages MU's data collection, annotation and visualization competencies and applies them to TV programming, providing broadcasters with innovative information services for distributing digital content.