Prof Touradj Ebrahimi from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Touradj Ebrahimi is Professor of image processing at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He is active in teaching and research in multimedia signal processing and heads the Multimedia Signal Processing Group at EPFL. Since 2014, he has been the Convenor (Chairman) of the JPEG standardization Committee which has produced a family of standards that have revolutionised the world of imaging.

Prof. Ebrahimi is involved in Ecma International as a member of its ExeCom since 2020 and serves as consultant, evaluator and expert for European Commission and other governmental funding agencies in Europe and advises a number of Venture Capital companies in Switzerland in their scientific and technical audits. He has founded several startup and spinoff companies in the past two decades, including the most recent RayShaper SA, a research company based in Crans-Montana involved in AI powered multimedia. Prof. Ebrahimi is author or co-author of over 300 scientific publications and holds a dozen invention patents.

Talk Title

Challenges and solutions to trust in AI-assisted synthetic media

Talk Summary

The use of artificial intelligence in creating synthetic media, either from scratch or by changing parts of an existing content, has become very popular. The drivers behind this popularity are in a wide spread access to often initially open source deepfake and Generative AI algorithms, but also in the low cost, their performance and their ease of use by nonprofessionals. Some see this trend as a profound paradigm shift that will redefine the foundations of creativity and opens doors to new opportunities in entertainment, gaming and art to mention a few among many applications. But at the same time, several challenges have surfaced, among which concerns about their use in misinformation and fraud.

In this talk, we will focus on AI-assisted synthetic media in form of visual information and starts with an overview of the most popular algorithms in deepfake and Generative AI applied to visual content, highlighting their performance in generating synthetic content through a number of concrete illustrations. We then move to an in-depth analysis of challenges that arise not only in terms of performance to generate synthetic media but also other other relevant issues such as how to identify synthetic media as opposed to those generated by sensors operating in the real world, as well as various trust and security issues surrounding them. The talk will conclude by highlighting the current trends in solutions to cope with challenges in AI-assisted synthetic media and in particular two major approaches in their trust, namely, detection and provenance. We conclude with a discussion on business, ethical, legal and societal challenges and how they are coped with.