The MediaEval Multimedia Evaluation benchmark was founded in 2008 as VideoCLEF and in 2011 became an independent benchmarking initiative. Each year it offers tasks that are related to multimedia retrieval, analysis, and exploration. This year MediaEval offered 12 tasks: Emotional Mario: Believable AI agents in video games Emotions and Themes in Music FakeNews: Corona virus and 5G conspiracy Flood-related Multimedia Insight for Wellbeing: Multimodal personal health lifelog data analysis Medico NewsImages: The role of images in online news No-Audio Multimodal Speech Detection Task Pixel Privacy: Quality Camouflage for Social Images Predicting Media Memorability Scene Change: Fun faux photos Sports Video Classification A COVID-19-related task could not be missing as the misinformation around the coronavirus has been of great concern. The ‘FakeNews: Corona virus and 5G conspiracy’ task was introduced and was related to misinformation claims that the construction of the 5G network and the associated electromagnetic radiation triggers the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

On the 24th of April 2020, a huge coronavirus-related hackathon started, the EUvsVirus Hackathon, organized by the European Commission. Over 20,900 people across the EU and beyond took part, with 2,150 solutions submitted in areas including health and life (898), business continuity (381), remote working and education (270), social and political cohesion (452), digital finance (75) and other challenges (83).

The International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) is one of the major computer vision conferences, hosted by IEEE and CVF. Along with the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) and the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), they are the three top tier conferences in the world in the field of computer vision.

The Truth and Trust Online conference achieved its mission to bring together people with different backgrounds, levels of seniority, origin and also from various disciplines. It covered a wide range of issues around the challenge of misinformation and the 257 participants had two days of amazing talks from people of well known companies, universities, media organizations, NGOs, such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, BBC, Full Fact and others.

The Thessaloniki edition of the Researchers’ Night was held on September 27 and tried to bring researchers closer to society and inspire more young people to get involved with research. Researchers’ Night 2019 took place at Thessaloniki Concert Hall. Photo by Symeon Papadopoulos A large crowd of people of all ages attended the event and more than 100 of them were interested in the hot topic of misinformation. The Media Verification team of CERTH-ITI was there to demonstrate tools for media verification developed within the InVID and WeVerify projects.

The International Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation Exposure ROME 2019 was co-located with the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, which took place on July 21-25, 2019 in Paris. On Thursday 25th, ROME 2019 and 7 other workshops were held in the Cité des Sciences located in the north-east of Paris. The Cité des sciences is located within the park La Villette which is home to exhibitions, and shows.

The Media Verification team of CERTH-ITI was invited to organize a hackathon, titled ‘The Web Media Verification Challenge’, in the 1st EURASIP-GAIPDM Seasonal School, that took place in Thessaloniki, Greece on July 15-19. 2019. The school covered various categories of digital signals, namely content found in audio, images, videos, speech, and biosignals, and aimed to introduce practitioners to all aspects of current and future digital media processing and analysis, stepping into the fields of Signal Processing, Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition/Machine Learning, and Computational Intelligence.

The EU-funded InVID and WeVerify projects were featured prominently in this year’s South-By-Southwest Conference and Festival (SXSW2019) and the Media Verification Team of CERTH-ITI was there to present them. Postdoctoral Associate Dr Markos Zampoglou was invited from MeVer, alongside Denis Teyssou from AFP, our partner in both InVID and WeVerify.