DARPA Names Research Teams to Develop Manipulated Media Detection Tools Under SemaFor Program; Matt Turek Quoted

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has selected the research teams that will work to meet the research objectives of a program that seeks to develop semantic technology platforms designed to automate the detection, characterization and attribution of falsified media assets.

Kitware, SRI International, Purdue University and the University of California in Berkeley will lead four teams of researchers to develop semantic detection, characterization and attribution algorithms under the Semantic Forensics program, DARPA said Tuesday.

Lockheed Martin’s (NYSE: LMT) Advanced Technology Laboratories will oversee a research team that will develop a SemaFor prototype and tools that can be used for automatic curation of evidence collected by the algorithms.

Accenture Federal Services, NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA), Google and Carahsoft, Systems & Technology Research and New York University will lead research teams that will work to characterize the threats posed by altered media and come up with challenge problems.

A research group led by PAR Government Systems will focus on data curation and evaluation initiatives under the SemaFor program.

“From a defense standpoint, SemaFor is focused on exploiting a critical weakness in automated media generators,” said Matt Turek, a DARPA program manager overseeing SemaFor. “Through this program we aim to explore the failure modes where current techniques for synthesizing media break down.”

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