WeMuV 2015 - Workshop on Web Multimedia Verification (WeMuV)

The wide availability of multimedia capturing equipment (e.g. smartphones, cameras) and the ever increasing use of online social networking and media sharing platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have led to the pervasive use of multimedia content, often user-generated, for reporting on and documenting news stories and events. Establishing the authenticity and veracity of online multimedia content appears to be an increasingly challenging problem, especially in settings where time is a very scarce resource (e.g. breaking news reporting) and the amount of data to be analyzed increasingly large. Failure to verify multimedia content may have severe consequences ranging from personal and brand reputation damage to widespread panic among civilians in the case of natural disasters.
It becomes clear that the availability of methods and tools for automatically assessing the veracity and authenticity of multimedia content published online is of primary importance for ensuring reliable and objective information of the public. Yet, developing such methods in the era of pervasive multimedia capturing and sharing presents a set of unique challenges. Notably, there has been an increasing trend for commoditization and sophistication of media editing software and services, sometimes to the point of being seamlessly intertwined in the media generation process; e.g. several digital filters are at the disposal of Instagram users immediately after the capturing of a photo, leading to the widespread online availability of digitally forged multimedia (be it for malicious or entertainment purposes). What is more, once a multimedia item is published (e.g. in the context of a breaking news story) and attracts attention, it is shared, commented and actively scrutinized by a diverse community of online users, giving rise to new opportunities for gathering insights regarding its veracity. Leveraging such content and its surrounding online context holds the potential for new effective means of verification. What is more, novel computing paradigms putting the human-in-the-loop, e.g. crowdsourcing and collaborative information management platforms, offer new opportunities for leveraging human intelligence at scale for tasks that are hardly solvable by existing algorithmic solutions.