Next++ Workshop, Singapore by Lesia Tkacz

The NeXt++ Workshop proved to be a wonderful opportunity to connect social issues with technical solutions, and to connect with peers on both the CDT and international level.

The first day of presentations collectively worked to position current socio-technical issues within AI and connected society as the central focus of the event. This included highlighting the value of well designed explainable AI, the journey of AI’s development towards a blend of data-rich and knowledge driven methods, and how machines can help us with the challenge of Fake News and other misleading web content.

On the second day of the workshop, my team worked on defining the problem area delineated by fake multimedia content.

Working with other doctoral students from both the National University of Singapore and Tsinghua University was a great experience not only to share views on the problem from different disciplinary perspectives, but to work within an international team. We focused on designing machine and ‘naked-eye’ human approaches to identifying both misleading digitally manipulated images, and AI generated fake images. Working together helped us to understand the problem as an interdisciplinary one, and enabled us to articulate where human factors intersect with machine performance.