DéjàVu

In this research project, we focus on synchronizing specific events in space and time (X-coherence), fact-checking, and mining persons, objects and contents of interest from various and heterogeneous sources including - but not limited to - the internet, social media and surveillance imagery. For that, we seek to harness information from various media sources and synchronize the multiple textual and visual information pieces around the position of an event or object as well as order them so as to allow a better understanding about what happened before, during, and shortly after the event. After automatically organizing the data and understanding the order of the facts, we can devise and deploy solutions for mining persons or objects of interest for suspect analysis/tracking, fact checking, or even understanding the nature of the said event. Additionally, by exploring the possible existing links among different pieces of information, we aim at further designing and developing media integrity analytics tools to hint at existing forgeries, sensitive content (e.g., violent content, child pornography), and spreading patterns of multimedia objects online. With demanding and sophisticated crimes and terrorist threats becoming ever more pervasive, allied with the advent and spread of fake news, our objective is to use the developed solutions to help us answering the four most important questions in forensics regarding an event: “who,” “in what circumstances,” “why,” and “how,” thus identifying the characteristics and circumstances in which an event has taken place.