New hackathon win for our colleague, Artur Isac, and his team in the “Global Defense Technologies Hackathon”, 4 – 6 December 2020.
Another month, another hackathon win for Artur, one of our Junior Software Engineers in Chisinau. Along with university colleagues he took part in the “Global Defense Technologies Hackathon“, organized by the Azerbaijani State Agency for Public Service and Social Innovations, Innovations Center and New Space.
With the core mission to protect civic population during conflicts, the international online event was designed to bring together defense and technology experts, young professionals, programmers and engineers to share new ideas and develop innovative architecture and software solutions in the security and defense fields.
From the main event tracks (Information Security, Civil Defense, Digital Deceit and Propaganda, and Defense Technologies), Artur’s team – FAKEreveal – selected Digital Deceit and Propaganda as the theme for their project meant to identify DeepFake data. In a world where people believe video content is highly trustworthy, applications like DeepFake (which can quickly swap people’s faces in videos) can become a dangerous tool. The solution developed by FAKEreveal allows the detection of DeepFake content on any application or screen, via website or as Google Chrome extension.
More details about the technicalities of the solution, its real-life applicability and future developments are available in the short video presentation delivered by the team in support of their project at the hackathon.
We asked Artur about the challenges of the project:
“We didn’t have powerful GPU to actually process videos in the neural network. Machine learning is really GPU intensive and specifically for working with videos, we found valuable help in an existing open-source project for face extraction and image compression with a pre-trained model. First we needed to reformat the code, then created a web server to use as an API, created the website and Google Chrome extension with the possibility to record videos and finally developed a fully functional application.”
But apart from the technical gains and wins, being part of the only team representing Moldova was in itself a great feeling. Coming out first from among 54 international teams which had lined up for the hackathon was a great achievement and encouragement for future participations. Once again, we all congratulate Artur and we are proud to have him in our team!