The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

In this talk, we will discuss problems associated with synchronizing specific events in space and time (X-coherence), fact-checking, and mining persons, objects and contents of interest from various and heterogeneous sources including — but not limited to — the internet, social media and surveillance imagery. For that, we seek to harness information from various media sources and synchronize the multiple textual and visual information pieces around the position of an event or object as well as order them so as to allow a better understanding about what happened before, during, and shortly after the event. After automatically organizing the data and understanding the order of the facts, we can devise and deploy solutions for mining persons or objects of interest for suspect analysis/tracking, fact-checking, or even understanding the nature of the said event. Our objective is to use the developed solutions to help us answering the four most important questions in forensics regarding an event: “who,” “in what circumstances,” “why,” and “how,” thus identifying the characteristics and circumstances in which an event has taken place.

Nano-bio: Anderson Rocha is an associate professor at the Institute of Computing, University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil. His main interests include Digital Forensics, Reasoning for Complex Data and Machine Intelligence. He is an elected affiliate member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) and the Brazilian Academy of Forensic Sciences (ABC). He is a two-term elected member of the IEEE Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IFS-TC) and, in December 2017, he has been elected vice-chair of this committee for the 2018 term. He is a Microsoft Research and a Google Research Faculty Fellow. In addition, in 2016, he has been awarded the Tan Chin Tuan (TCT/Singapore) Fellowship. He has been the principal investigator of a number of research projects in partnership with public funding agencies in Brazil and abroad as well as national and multi-national companies having already deposited and licensed several patents. Since April 2017, he has been the Associate Director of the Institute of Computing, University of Campinas (Unicamp).