PROVENANCE Project started in December 2018

The PROVENANCE Project, a new Horizon 2020 project, started at Graz University of Technology (TUGraz), Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science (ISDS), in which Dietrich Albert is still involved.

PROVENANCE (short for: Providing Verification Assistance for New Content) started on December 2018 and will last 36 months. It receives 2.4 million EUR funding from the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Programme (topic: ICT-28). The project is led by the Institute for Future Media and Journalism (FuJo) at Dublin City University (DCU). The consortium consists of seven partners including Trinity College Dublin (IE), Everis (ES), Czech Academy of Sciences (CZ), NewsWhip (IE), Cibervoluntarios Foundation (ES), and TUGraz (AT).

PROVENANCE focuses on finding solutions to enable people to distinguish between original information and manipulated information or disinformation. The PROVENANCE approach will involve the use of a “verification layer” that will employ advanced digital technologies for multimedia analytics (including image forensics) to record any modifications to content and to identify similar pieces of content. A digital companion will be developed that supports users in recognising and understanding misinformation.

The project solutions will be of particular use for consumers of news and political information, but also for content creators who want to secure their content from manipulation or unauthorised use. This is of particular importance, as the rapid spread of misinformation online has been identified as one of the top 10 trends in modern societies (World Economic Forum, 2014).

The ISDS contribution will mainly focus on (a) the elaboration of a digital literacy concept to advance the use of and trust in social media of journalists and the general public, and (b) the overall project evaluation including the development of an evaluation tool that supports the evaluation by automatically collecting and analysing user and usage data.

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