Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Multimedia Verification

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2017 International Workshop on Multimedia Verification (MuVer'17) at the ACM Multimedia Conference. Multimedia, especially material that also includes video content, is a very powerful means for the spreading of information via different distribution channels (e.g. social networks, online, broadcasting). This is especially the case when it comes to obtaining timely information about what is happening directly around us, or elsewhere in the world (think of the recent terror attacks, natural disasters, celebrity events and such like). The digital media revolution and the convergence of social media with wired and wireless broadband connectivity have already brought breaking news to a multitude of digital platforms, both traditional and comparatively new ones. Furthermore, news organizations delivering information by web streams and TV broadcast (be it traditional organizations or newly established ones, the latter being primarily web-based) increasingly rely on user-generated multimedia recordings of breaking and developing news events shared by others in social networks for reporting or illustrating a story. However, there is not only richness and expressiveness of information in user-generated multimedia content; there is also a high risk of deception and misinformation (e.g. deliberately misleading information, such as propaganda). Access to increasingly sophisticated multimedia editing and content management tools, and the ease with which fake information spreads in electronic networks, means that news outlets and social platforms that wish to become or remain reputable, as well as amateurs re-publishing multimedia items (e.g. bloggers), need to carefully verify third party content before they (re-)publish and share it. This is vital in order to break news quickly, but not at the expense of accuracy and factuality. Furthermore, individual consumers of TV and online social media and multimedia sharing services are increasingly aware of the risk of deception that exists in media sharing and dissemination. That is why more and more people are (gradually) becoming interested in and aware of simple ways of understanding what to trust, how to assess the veracity of information, and how to debunk fake or misleading content. The goal of MuVer'17 is to bring together multimedia and video processing researchers, social media researchers, digital multimedia forensics experts, new media professionals, as well as multimedia and social sharing platform representatives, in an interdisciplinary forum for presenting and discussing the latest advances and open challenges in multimedia verification. The workshop program is organized into two keynote talks and a session of oral paper presentations. The two keynote talks are:"Multimedia forensics: an overview of recent advances and open issues", delivered by Dr. Giulia Boato (University of Trento, Italy)"Privacy vs Multimedia Verification: A Conundrum", delivered by Dr. Gerald Friedland (University of California Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab, USA) The oral paper presentation session includes three full papers: "Collaborative Networks for Person Verification" addresses the problem of identification of people in video surveillance systems."Video Retrieval for Multimedia Verification of Breaking News on Social Networks" presents an approach to automatically detect breaking news events from social media streams, and collecting relevant video documents."The InVID Plug-in: Web Video Verification on the Browser" presents an open-source browser plug-in that aims to support journalists and news professionals in their efforts to verify user-generated video content.