WeVerify at EU@SXSW

The European House EU@SXSW in Austin — A view of the European house (EU@SXSW) in Austin ©EU@SXSW

From 09 till 11th of March, our WeVerify project was featured prominently alongside its predecessor InVID in the famous South-By-Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW2019) at Austin, Texas.

Markos Zampoglou from CERTH and Denis Teyssou from AFP were there to present both projects and their verification tools. They attended the public at the European house, thanks to an invitation of the European Union delegation in the US.

The EU House at SXSW (EU@SXSW) was situated on the “Palm Door on 6th” on Austin’s 6th lively street. The InVID/WeVerify presentation and demos, designed by AFP, were displayed on a number of touch-screens where a redesigned version of the InVID Plugin was run on a set of hand-picked real world examples.

If you are at #SXSW2019 and want to see how #EU @H2020Projects @InVID_EU & @WeVerify tackle #disinformation : we have a live demo on touch screen 4u.
Dozen of visitors found it “awesome” (quote). i.a. we had @MIT and @Google researchers. @craignewmark himself came to chat. pic.twitter.com/hw1HlIqJwe
— Denis Teyssou (@dteyssou) March 10, 2019

We guided visitors through the newly built interactive demo facilitating the use of the plugin. We also explained to them the results and discussed the role and impact of the EU Research in tackling online disinformation. As an increasingly worrying problem, fighting false information was a hot topic in Austin, with several panels and sub-conferences.

A view of the InVID-WeVerify demo on touch screens ©Denis Teyssou

Several panels of the SXSW2019 conference were dealing with disinformation and our exhibition attracted many people interested to see what can be done to tackle false information.

Demoing InVID-WeVerify to MIT researchers ©EU@SXSW

Researchers from MIT and Google, web celebrities, like entrepreneur and philanthropist Craig Newmark, came to chat with us and to see how our demos work. We showcased especially the keyframes fragmentation and the forensic analysis tools, both available in one click through the interactive display.

The exhibition at the European house was also an opportunity to meet with the US and international press attending the Austin festival, like NPR Silicon Valley correspondent Aarti Shahani (see picture below).