Establishment of the Synthetic Media International Research Center – Advancing Research on AI-Generated Video, Deepfake Detection, and Media Trustworthiness

Inter-University Research Institute Corporation, Information and Systems Research Organization, National Institute of Informatics (NIINIIThe National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (NAIST), headed by Professor Echizen Isao of the NII's Information and Society Research Division, has recently established the Synthetic Media International Research Center (Director: Professor Echizen Isao of the NII's Information and Society Research Division). The center was established in response to the importance of research being carried out by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)'s CREST projects "Social Information Infrastructure Technology to Overcome the Infodemic" ^(*1) (Principal Investigator: Professor Echizen Isao of the NII's Information and Society Research Division, Director of the center) and "VoicePersonae: Voice Identity Cloning and Protection" ^(*2) (Principal Investigator: Professor Yamagishi Junichi of the NII's Content Science Research Division, Deputy Director of the center).

In the future, in order to realize a human-centric AI society, we will act as an international hub to promote research and development into the generation of "synthetic media," which is AI-generated video with realistic audio, targeting a variety of modalities such as faces, voices, bodies, and natural language, the detection of "synthetic media generated for fraudulent purposes (fake media)," ensuring the reliability of media, and decision-making support, while addressing real-world issues.