Understanding and Mitigating the impacts of Synthetic Realities on Society

• Grant number: 24/14064-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: December 01, 2024
• End date: November 30, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computing Methodologies and Techniques
• Principal Investigator: Anderson de Rezende Rocha
• Grantee: Ana Carolina Pontalti Monari
• Host Institution: Instituto de Computação (IC). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 23/12865-8 - Horus: artificial intelligence techniques to detect and forestall synthetic realities, AP.TEM

Abstract

The Horus Project is an ambitious and multidisciplinary endeavor aimed at contributing to the landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) research and to digital media trust. Comprising five distinct and interconnected research lines - (A) robust feature learning, (B) open-set recognition, (C) self-supervised learning, (D) multi-modality learning, and (E) fusion techniques - the project seeks to address critical challenges in AI development, such as enhancing model generalization, enabling cross-modal understanding, and promoting self-supervised learning paradigms. The research lines serve as the backbone for the development of eight diverse applications, addressing pressing challenges in the digital era. These applications include (A1) deepfake and (A2) general synthetic media detection, combating the rising threat of synthetic media manipulation; (A3) authorship attribution, bolstering content authenticity and integrity; (A4) phishing detection, safeguarding users against malicious online activities; (A5) fact-checking, promoting information accuracy and combating misinformation; (A6) scientific forgery detection, preserving the credibility of scholarly publications; (A7) presentation and injection attack detection, thwarting cyber threats in various biometric domains; and (A8) AI-enabled child-pornography detection, reinforcing efforts to protect vulnerable populations. This Postdoctoral project will touch topics related to all fronts and, in specific, will focus on the detection and impacts of applications A1, A2, A5, and A6.