The AI Foundation Partners with Top Artificial Intelligence Researchers at the Technical University of Munich to Combat Against Fake Media and Deepfakes
Research Team Led By Renowned Scientist Matthias Niessner to Detect Deepfakes, Verify the Authenticity of Visual Media
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The AI Foundation, a leader in creating foundational AI technologies, products and services to unlock the human potential, as well as Guardian AI to protect society from its risks, has partnered with the Technical University of Munich’s Visual Computing Lab, providing resources for world renowned scientist Professor Matthias Niessner and his team to continue research in artificial intelligence, deep learning and computer vision.
The AI Foundation, headed by CEO Lars Buttler and CTO Rob Meadows, will utilize research from the lab in their development and engineering of products for safe and revolutionary AI, as well as create and publish breakthrough research in the areas of cognitive science, artificial general intelligence, and human behavior. The company recently announced that it expanded its world-class team of scientists with the addition of Joscha Bach, Ph.D., and Delip Rao as vice presidents who will be working closely with researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).
“The authenticity of images and video can no longer be taken at face value, as artificial intelligence and other technologies allow for instant generation of complex fakes. As a result of the proliferation of fakes, human agency and free thinking are at risk,” said AI Foundation CEO Lars Buttler. “With regards to our current global, socio-political climate and the heightened risk of manipulation to world democracies, the AI Foundation is committed to addressing both imminent and distant future threats. By partnering with TUM, the AI Foundation will continue to develop products to protect society from the ills of malicious AI, including deceptive deepfakes and synthetic media.”
The partnership with TUM is part of the AI Foundation’s larger mission, inviting scientific researchers, media partners, policy-makers, and the global community to join the company in a collective effort to research, identify and combat manipulative AI. The company has already begun to develop a growing community of users reporting suspected fakes and training AI agents with the development of Reality Defender, a guardian-AI protecting against fake media including deepfakes. TUM’s research in advanced AI forensics will enhance the tool’s evolving capabilities; as synthetic images become more advanced, the Reality Defender too will advance, growing more capable of detecting new forms of artificial media.
Professor Matthias Niessner leads the Visual Computing Lab at TUM in their research of computer vision, graphics, and machine learning, focused on how these intersect as well as cutting-edge techniques for 3D reconstruction, semantic 3D scene understanding, video editing, and AI-driven video synthesis. He has published over 70 academic papers and has instructed at Stanford University as a visiting assistant professor. Niessner’s research has received worldwide acclaim and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Spiegel and MIT Technological Review, among others. He is a TUM-IAS Rudolph Moessbauer Fellow and has won several awards, including the Google Faculty Award for Machine Perception, the Nvidia Professor Partnership Award and the European Research Council Starting Grant’s award of over $1.5M in research funding.
By developing advanced techniques to modify videos in real time, researchers have acquired a vital part in understanding manipulated images and videos. The AI Foundation’s partnership with TUM will continue to research and reveal how to identify and protect the public from adversarial fake media.
For more information, please visit AIFoundation.com.
About the AI Foundation
The AI Foundation is dedicated to moving the world forward by giving each of us our own AI that shares our personal values and goals. The company has brought together many of the world’s top innovators, AI scientists, engineers, and investors from Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Madison Avenue, all united around the idea of making the power of AI available to all, while protecting us from its dangers. The AI Foundation’s non-profit entity focuses on tools for detection and protection, while AI Foundation’s for-profit creates foundational technologies, products and services to unlock the full human potential.
About the Technical University of Munich
The Technical University of Munich (TUM) is one of Europe’s leading research universities, with around 550 professors, 41,000 students, and 10,000 academic and non-academic staff. Its focus areas are the engineering sciences, natural sciences, life sciences and medicine, combined with economic and social sciences. TUM acts as an entrepreneurial university that promotes talents and creates value for society. In that it profits from having strong partners in science and industry. It is represented worldwide with the TUM Asia campus in Singapore as well as offices in Beijing, Brussels, Cairo, Mumbai, San Francisco, and São Paulo. Nobel Prize winners and inventors such as Rudolf Diesel, Carl von Linde, and Rudolf Mößbauer have done research at TUM. In 2006 and 2012 it won recognition as a German “Excellence University.” In international rankings, TUM regularly places among the best universities in Germany.
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This article published with permission from Business Wire
