vera.ai: Horizon EU project kick-off

KInIT is a proud member of the consortium for the new vera.ai project, which officially started only recently, on September 15, 2022. vera.ai project is funded by the European Commission as a part of the Horizon Europe “Artificial Intelligence against Disinformation” call until 2025. The overall goal of the project is to develop and build reliable Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to aid in countering disinformation in various forms, including text, audio, images, and video. One of KInIT’s roles in the project is to contribute to the research on multilingual textual content, with a specific focus on low-resource languages.

The target user group for the vera.ai solutions consists of journalists, fact-checkers, researchers, and investigators of human rights violations – predominantly for media professionals who need to be able to detect fake content quickly and easily.

The ambition of vera.ai project is to prototype and test its developments in close collaboration with these media professionals to develop more effective software tools.

This technology research project will also work closely with the various anti-disinformation hubs and initiatives under the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), including our Central European Digital Media Observatory (CEDMO).

The project was kicked off with all 14 partners on September 27 – 28, 2022 in Greece. Two KInIT representatives took part in the kick-off meeting in person, Mária Bieliková and Ivan Srba. In addition, our two colleagues participated remotely – namely Martin Hyben, our new research enforcement working on the vera.ai project, and Elena Moťovská, our vera.ai’s project manager. During the two days we dove deep into the planned work and actions, followed by intensive and fruitful discussions about particular research challenges we will address during the project. 

Getting together with our colleagues for the physical kick-off was a very valuable experience and gave a significant boost to our already very high motivation. It was really encouraging and inspiring to see the dedication and expertise on board.

We are very proud to be part of this great research team and look forward to collaborating with all partners to tackle information disorders. 

Follow vera.ai on Twitter for the latest project updates. 

The project is coordinated by the Mever (Media Verification) team of the Informatics Research Institute ITI-CERTH in Thessaloniki, Greece. 

vera.ai’s research partners are the University of Sheffield (UK), the Universities of Urbino Carlo Bo and Naples Federico II (Italy), the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), the Fraunhofer Institute (Germany), the Borelli Centre of the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay (France), the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies (Slovakia). 

vera.ai’s media partners are AFP (France), the EBU (Switzerland) and the German international channel Deutsche Welle. Industry partners involve Sirma AI (Bulgaria), the Athens Technology Centre (Greece), and NGOs are represented by EU DisinfoLab (Belgium).