Irene Amerini (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)

Title: Advances in Multimedia forensics to counter misinformation

Abstract: The diffusion of easy-to-use editing tools accessible to a wider and wider public induced in the last decade growing issues about the dependability of digital media. Concerns recently reached an unprecedented level thanks to the development of a new class of artificial intelligent techniques capable of producing high quality fake images and videos (e.g., Deepfakes) without requiring any specific technical know-how from the users. The problem of misinformation has been exacerbated by the prevalence of such artificially generated contents and by the speed at which information spreads through social media. The continuous progress in deep learning has led to the emerging of increasingly sophisticated technologies for generating deceptive content (e.g., StableDiffusion, Midjourney, Dall-E2) as well as developing corresponding detection methods. Multimedia Forensics is constantly working on devising countermeasures to detect manipulated and fake images to hinder their dissemination. This seminar aims at describing the latest findings and advancements in deep learning approaches for identifying fake media and highlighting the research challenges ahead.

Bio: Irene Amerini is Associate Professor at DIAG, the Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering of Sapienza University of Rome in Italy where she leads the ALCORLab Multimedia Forensics Research Team. Previously she was a Researcher at DIAG and a postdoctoral researcher at MICC Media Integration and Communication Center, University of Florence where she received the Ph.D. in computer engineering in 2011. In 2018 she obtained a Visiting Research Fellowship at Charles Sturt University offered by the Australian Government through the Endeavour Scholarship & Fellowship program. She is currently a member of the IEEE Forensics and Security Technical Committee, EURASIP Biometrics, Data Forensics, and Security and of IAPR Computational Forensics Committee. She is Associate Editor of the Elsevier Journal of Information Security and Applications and guest editors of many special issues in various journals on the theme of multimedia content security technologies and deep learning for image and video forensics.