ONTOTEXT will coordinate the overall project as well as lead WP3, where, together with ATC, they will implement the WeVerify open platform for decentralised content verification. Building on its expertise in solution development, platforms targeting media and publishing, and development of open-source tools, ONTO will thus orchestrate and integrate the contributions of the project’s technology providers.
USFD will lead WP6 which will develop the WeVerify citizen-oriented digital companion. In WP4 the project team will develop human-in-the-loop tools, based on state-of-the-art machine learning-based algorithms from the PHEME project (including rumour detection, stance analysis, and veracity classification). USFD will also engage actively with the definition and implementation of the open-source WeVerify platform (WP3), as well as contribute to the use case pilots, dissemination, and community building.
DW will lead work package 2 Use Case Definitions and Requirements Analysis, lead the Dissemination task (Part of WP 8) and be furthermore active in WP 7 (Pilots, Evaluation and Engagement), with less prominent involvement in some of the other WPs. The primary task of the DW team is to be involved in the identification and formulation of requirements, and the development, description and updating of use cases. Testing and evaluating WeVerify solutions will also be a core part of DW’s involvement in WeVerify. All this will be done from the perspective of journalists working in / for a “traditional” (public service) media organisation.
DW will also bring its experience from other relevant undertakings into WeVerify (esp. the REVEAL and InVID projects, and from developing and running its collaborative verification platform Truly Media – operated with partner ATC). Furthermore, DW – being experts in information diffusion and spreading – will take an active role in dissemination activities and lead this task. All this is to ensure that work and activities are demand-driven, meet clear user needs, have highest exploitation potential and are communicated professionally and appropriately to the respective target groups.
As a world-renown news agency, AFP is a user partner of WeVerify, aiming to use the technologies developed in the project in its future operations. AFP Medialab will participate in the gathering of user requirements, will test and evaluate the developed technologies and will exploit those technologies for its newsroom. Some co-development is also foreseen, including an active role in use case work, dissemination and exploitation.
ATC will act as the Exploitation Manager and lead the respective work package (WP 8) of the project, including the respective task for Innovation and Exploitation planning (T8.4). This includes focusing considerably on sustainability and exploitation of the WeVerify results, ensuring that IPR related strategies are in place, the market is continuously monitored, and business planning and modelling takes place.
Furthermore, ATC will be instrumental in delivering the professional platform for verification services by improving TrulyMedia, which is already one of the leading solutions in the area, connecting it with tools that will be developed in WeVerify. While many of those WeVerify tools and services will also be offered as open source, TrulyMedia will be the premium professional environment, which will eventually become the commercial offering and main exploitable outcome of WeVerify.
Alongside what has been outlined above, ATC will guide all the tool development work and use cases with their strong business experience of over twenty years in the media sector. Especially its experience in marketing commercial services (such as NewsAsset) as well as bringing results of EC funded R&D projects into the market (such as TruthNest and TrulyMedia) will be of great value to WeVerify.
CERTH will contribute to the innovation activities of the project by: a) contributing to the design of the open platform (WP3), especially with respect to multimedia data collection, analysis and propagation; b) providing a multimedia verification framework based on computer vision (WP4), and contextual verification technologies for leveraging cross-modal information analysis (WP4). Additionally, the team will employ computer vision methods in order to support the tracking and the propagation of media content, and altered versions of it in social media (WP5). CERTH will also participate in all relevant horizontal project activities, i.e. project management (WP1), use case analysis, requirements definition (WP2), evaluation and pilot support (WP7), and dissemination and exploitation planning (WP8).
TheEU DisinfoLab will lead WP5 on sourcing and tracking of disinformation flows in social networks. The team will build on its established track record in using social network analysis to map social media communities, monitor them and source disinformation. The EU DisinfoLab will also play a leading role in the gathering of user requirements and be very active in the work package that covers the community pilots, evaluation, and engagement.
