Project RIT is involved with receives massive media attention
Dylan Peter
Christye Sisson instructs students during work on the MediFor project.
In an era where fake news is everywhere, Rochester Institute of Technology is helping to spot what is fact and what is fiction.
The university is part of a world-class group of researchers working to develop an algorithmic-based platform that can identify image, audio and video manipulation, thus reduce the amount and impact of fabricated news. The government-funded project is known as MediFor (short for media forensics), and it’s recently garnered national and local media attention, with some of RIT’s contributions being highlighted.
RIT’s principal investigator for the project is Christye Sisson, Ronald Mabel Francis Professor and chair of the photographic sciences program in the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences (SPAS). Ted Kinsman, SPAS assistant professor, and Christopher Kanan, assistant professor in the College of Science’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, are working with Sisson on the project. So, too, are students from RIT’s photographic sciences, advertising photography, fine art photography, motion picture science, media arts and technology, and imaging science programs.
RIT is on the project’s data team, which recently created a video representative of an audio/voice swap manipulation for use in a CBS story. A portion of the resulting video — which also demonstrates how the algorithms work in detecting abnormalities — ended up appearing in CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News pieces. Additionally, local station WROC-TV detailed RIT’s involvement in MediFor.
RIT’s video used in the WROC-TV story and CBS and NBC broadcasts was produced by the following students: Lydia Dye (photographic sciences), Madelyn Hammond, Kate McIndoe (advertising photography), Catherine Meininger (motion picture science), Andrew Palmer (photographic sciences) and Owen Thompson (motion picture science). It is a 30-second shot of Hammond reciting the Declaration of Independence where, 10 seconds in, her voice is swapped with another person’s while still being synced to her lips.
RIT’s video is played in this NBC story around the 1:00 mark. It also appears in the below CBS story around the 2:50 mark:
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