The Media Analysis, Verification and Retrieval group (MeVer), a research group in the Information Technologies Institute (ITI) of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), emerged as a result of our research in a number of projects in the areas of social media mining, retrieval and multimodal Artificial Intelligence.

We made our first steps in this area already in 2013 in the context of the SocialSensor project, where our collaboration with experts from the field of Media and Journalism, soon led us to acknowledge the rise of misleading media content in social media platforms such as Twitter. In the next years, we conducted research in the context of a number of follow-up projects, including InVID, REVEAL, WeVerify and developed technical components that assisted with the mitigation of different aspects of the media-based disinformation challenge, including among others a toolbox of image forensics approaches, a web-based service that assists with image verification, and other software repositories and tools.

In addition to the above, we have been actively dealing with the development of new benchmarking resources and methods. In 2015 and 2016, we organized the Verifying Multimedia Use challenge in the context of the MediaEval Benchmarking Initiative, which was accompanied by the release of an annotated corpus of tweets (categorized as “fake” or “real”). Next, to support the real-world benchmarking needs of the image tampering localization problem, we developed the Wild Web tampered image dataset, which has been a valuable resource for image forensics researchers worldwide. Our recent dataset releases include the Fake Video Corpus and the FIVR-200K datasets, the first aiming to help researchers better understand the nuances of the video verification challenge, the latter focusing on the problem of near-duplicate video retrieval in relation to breaking news incidents.

While we continue to support and refine our technologies in this rapidly evolving area, we are currently also trying to better understand and tackle the challenge of AI-generated multimedia (aka synthetic media or deepfakes) in the context of a number of relevant projects such as vera.ai, AI4Trust and AI-CODE. This is an increasingly complex challenge given the proliferation and constant improvement of deep-learning based methods for generating realistic media content of high fidelity and the continuous evolution of means and strategies of online misinformation. We’ll be posting our findings and hopefully useful resources on this website. All these technologies are brought to users, who are mainly professionals working in the fight against disinformation, through the various relevant projects in which they are also involved. One central effort we are making in this direction is through the Mediaterranean Digital Media Observatory, which we coordinate and strives to bring relavant methods and technologies into practice, with regular fact-checking, research and educational activities that can benefit the society in this constant battle.

Furthermore, we are increasingly interested in the challenges arising from the wide deployment of AI technologies in numerous industrial and business sectors and in general our daily life. A particular area of interest for our group is AI fairness, where we are coordinating the MAMMOth Horizon Europe project. Additional aspects of interest concern the efficient use of AI resources and in general the sustainability of AI technologies. Related projects on Sustainable AI include AI4Media, ELIAS and CASSATA.

Last but not least, we are also working on a number of domain-focused innovation projects where we apply advanced data analytics and AI methods in novel contexts and settings. These include improved cancer patient care management (REBECCA, RELEVIUM and MELIORA projects), energy communities (RESCHOOL project) and culture (ArtCast4D project).

Team

MeVer is a diverse and dynamic group of creative and enthusiastic researchers. You can get a quick glimpse in their profiles. The group is led by Principal Researcher Symeon (Akis) Papadopoulos and is part of the Multimedia Knowledge and Social Media Analytics (MKLab), directed by Research Director Yiannis Kompatsiaris.

Collaborators

In our research projects, we’ve worked with numerous researchers and experts in the areas of Media, Journalism, Web Mining and Multimedia. These collaborations were an inspiration for us and helped broaden our perspective and deepen our understanding of the challenges we are facing. As a minimum token of our appreciation, we would like to acknowledge them here (in alphabetic order): Giulia Boato (University of Trento), Petter Bae Brandtzaeg (SINTEF), Kalina Bontcheva (The University of Sheffield), Duc-Tien Dang-Nguyen (University of Bergen), Christos Diou (Harokopio University), Zhiwei Jin (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Vasilis Mezaris and Lampis Apostolidis (Centre for Research and Technology Hellas), Stuart E. Middleton (IT Innovation Centre), Nic Newman (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism), Eirini Ntoutsi (Bundeswehr University Munich), Ioannis Patras (Queen Mary University, London), Panagiotis Petrantonakis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Danae Tsampouraki and Stratos Tzoannos (Athens Technology Center), Steve Schifferes (City, University of London), Jochen Spangenberg and Ruben Bouwmeester (Deutsche Welle), Denis Teyssou (Agence France Presse), Andreas Veglis, Charalampos Dimoulas, Rigas Kotsakis and Dimitris Giomelakis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Luisa Verdoliva (University of Naples Federico II). We also maintain several academic collaborations in the context of joint supervision of bachelor, master and PhD students.

Work with Us

We are always open to new collaborations and partnerships. If you are a researcher and have an interesting idea that we could pursue together, please get in touch. If you are a graduate student or researcher and are looking for opportunities to carry out research in these areas, please get in touch.

If you are a company looking for solutions in the areas of online media analysis and verification, we are open to licensing our technologies and services, or discussing possibilities of contracted research tailored to your needs.

Given that funding is necessary for carrying out our activities, we are always interested in participating in collaborative project proposals (e.g. for EC-funded or national research and innovation projects).