We ran our exhibit on ImagineRIT on April 25th, 2026 at ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute in the Exhibit Hall. The experience of the DeFake Define project was deployed to test the visitors’ mettle against various deepfakes as well as asking them what they mean when they say “deepfake”. The latter is a part of a…
The exhibit What Do You Mean by “Fake”? An Interactive Exploration of Synthetic Media — with Kelly Wu, Ishmam Bin Rofi and Palavi Vinod Bhole. Visitors defined terms via microphone or keyboard (live transcription into a shared definition pool), played Is This Real? on authentic vs. AI-generated images and videos with a leaderboard, then saw which “media persona”…
Kelly Wu and Saniat Sohrawardi have traveled to Denver, Colorado, for the May workgroup meeting with a community of experts in digital media forensics. As professionals in the field, they have contributed to documents on existing and emerging AI-driven tools and hope to see these documents published soon.
Deceptive synthetic media threaten the credibility of information at critical moments. AI detection tools can help mitigate this risk—but only if they are effective, accessible, and usable in real-world, high-stakes contexts. The DeFake team are happy to have contributed to this effort that led to WITNESS’ TRIED: Truly Innovative and Effective AI Detection Benchmark. This…
Members of the project, Saniat Sohrawardi and Kelly Wu participated in the ClaimBuster Ideation Workshop where they engaged in fruitful discussions about the potential growth directions and improvements of the OpenSource ClaimBuster project and presented an overview of the DeFake Project to the audience.
Saniat Sohrawardi and Kelly Wu were invited to present two workshops on “Deepfakes Demystified: Empowering Law Enforcement in the Digital Age” at the 35th Annual LEVA Training Symposium in Indianapolis. The symposium coincided with Taylor Swift’s The Era Tour, so the host hotel was decorated in celebration, creating a unique and lively atmosphere for the…
The DeFake Project team contributed a chapter, “Verification AI in the Newsroom: A Cross-Cultural Study of Journalists’ Use of Deepfake Detection Tools” to the book, “Promoting AI’s Safe Usage for Elections”. With the release date unknown, more details can be found at http://ai4ce.org/book/. AuthorsSaniat Javid Sohrawardi, Rochester Institute of Technology,Y. Kelly Wu, Rochester Institute of…
Saniat Sohrawardi and Kelly Wu visited the SWGDE September ’24 meeting to participate in the ad-hoc AI and Imaging committees respectively, making major contributions to the standardization of the digital major forensics field.