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FAke News discovery and propagation from big Data ANalysis and artificial inteliGence

Year 2017

Title FAke News discovery and propagation from big Data ANalysis and artificial inteliGence

Leader Federico Álvarez García

Strategic Areas Data Engineering & Digital Transformation


Funding Entity Comisión Europea

The fake news phenomena is a well-known issue both in traditional printed news as well as in modern broadcast news and it has increased its negative impact in the era of on-line social networks.
In the era of social networks and digital citizenships the use of on-line media to spread deliberate misinformation and hoaxes may have a great negative impact in the society, in Europe as well as in is any other country.
A potential approach to fight fake news and address the post-truth effect is to systematically share knowledge and data across organizations: the emergence of Big Data tools and Data Science methods could tackle this problem and mitigate its societal impacts. New forms of business could be also generated that involve several stakeholders: Media Companies, such as news agencies, broadcasters, publisher, etc., governmental institutions and public organisations, the industry ecosystem, the whole society. The aim of FANDANGO (fandango.news) is to enable the aggregation and validation of different typologies of news (e.g. scientific data, media sources, on-line social networks, governmental open data) and to provide AI services to support Data Journalists in detecting potential fake news.
The project will contribute in breaking data interoperability barriers, and it will provide an integrated easy-to-use platform to support all relevant stakeholders. This approach and the related tools will be validated in three domains (Climate change, Refugees and Migration, and European policy) where misinformation tends to create major contrast in the citizens and society.   
FANDANGO, led by Engineering, includes Media Industries, SMEs, Universities, and Research centres challenged to provide solutions based on the exploitation of big data and artificial intelligence to address the fake news phenomena.
UPM (www.upm.es) through the research group GATV (www.gatv.ssr.upm.es) from the INFORMATION PROCESSING AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS CENTER (www.iptc.upm.es), is leading the multimedia data gathering and data lake model workpackage, besides developing tools based on machine learning and data analytics towards detecting  image/video forgery and detection of source in fake news activities.