Multimedia Forensics

This book is open access. Media forensics has never been more relevant to societal life. Not only media content represents an ever-increasing share of the data traveling on the net and the preferred communications means for most users, it has also become integral part of most innovative applications in the digital information ecosystem that serves various sectors of society, from the entertainment, to journalism, to politics. Undoubtedly, the advances in deep learning and computational imaging contributed significantly to this outcome. The underlying technologies that drive this trend, however, also pose a profound challenge in establishing trust in what we see, hear, and read, and make media content the preferred target of malicious attacks. In this new threat landscape powered by innovative imaging technologies and sophisticated tools, based on autoencoders and generative adversarial networks, this book fills an important gap. It presents a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art forensics capabilities that relate to media attribution, integrity and authenticity verification, and counter forensics. Its content is developed to provide practitioners, researchers, photo and video enthusiasts, and students a holistic view of the field

Digital Roots

Several of the most known and discussed concepts of the digital age predated the digitalization itself and have been previously used in the “analogue times”. Other concepts were coined for the digital society but have transformed and are continuously transforming over time. This edited book selects some of these concepts and starts a time travel through their history, heritage, reinvention, and reinvestment in media and communication studies

Multimedia Forensics

This book is open access. Media forensics has never been more relevant to societal life. Not only media content represents an ever-increasing share of the data traveling on the net and the preferred communications means for most users, it has also become integral part of most innovative applications in the digital information ecosystem that serves various sectors of society, from the entertainment, to journalism, to politics. Undoubtedly, the advances in deep learning and computational imaging contributed significantly to this outcome. The underlying technologies that drive this trend, however, also pose a profound challenge in establishing trust in what we see, hear, and read, and make media content the preferred target of malicious attacks. In this new threat landscape powered by innovative imaging technologies and sophisticated tools, based on autoencoders and generative adversarial networks, this book fills an important gap. It presents a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art forensics capabilities that relate to media attribution, integrity and authenticity verification, and counter forensics. Its content is developed to provide practitioners, researchers, photo and video enthusiasts, and students a holistic view of the field

Never Before Seen: Spectacle, Staging, and Story in Wildlife Film's Blue-Chip Renaissance

The topic of this dissertation is wildlife film and its representation of animal behaviour. I identify a blue-chip renaissance of wildlife documentary filmmaking in the early twenty-first century featuring conventional natural history subject matter, stunning visuals, unprecedented costs, an extended rhetoric of authenticity, and an emphasis on novel footage of animal behaviour. The blue-chip renaissance is a fertile site for investigating wildlife films as hybrid objects, as these films inhabit a set of major conceptual tensions between nature and culture; entertainment and education; and authenticity and artifice. In a review of extant literature (Chapter 1) I examine how those conceptual boundaries have been permeable and productive for scholars of wildlife film and related topics in multiple disciplines, motivating this dissertations interdisciplinary approach. I argue in Chapter 2 that the blue-chip renaissances visual spectacle is not an entertaining impediment to education, but rather a route to immersion and affective knowing, drawing from the legacy of natural history display. In Chapter 3, I analyze working filmmakers attitudes about staging practices in wildlife documentaries, a controversial topic that influences their professional identity as storytellers and observers of nature. Chapter 4 offers a taxonomy of the representation within the blue-chip renaissance and its authoritative public demonstration of nature, arguing that these films model and simulate a variety of real and theoretical entities and processes. In Chapter 5, I show that the authenticity of the blue-chip renaissances portrayal of nature is predicated on the extensive use of behind-the-scenes making-of documentaries employing observational realism. I conclude by exploring the challenges of locating any definitive cultural impacts of wildlife films, and offer instead directions for further research into wildlife films as experienced science communication

Film & Culture

Készült az ELTE Felsőoktatási Struktúraátalakítási Alapból támogatott programja keretében

Digital Roots

Several of the most known and discussed concepts of the digital age predated the digitalization itself and have been previously used in the “analogue times”. Other concepts were coined for the digital society but have transformed and are continuously transforming over time. This edited book selects some of these concepts and starts a time travel through their history, heritage, reinvention, and reinvestment in media and communication studies

Behavioural biometric identification based on human computer interaction

As we become increasingly dependent on information systems, personal identification and profiling systems have received an increasing interest, either for reasons of personali- sation or security. Biometric profiling is one means of identification which can be achieved by analysing something the user is or does (e.g., a fingerprint, signature, face, voice). This Ph.D. research focuses on behavioural biometrics, a subset of biometrics that is concerned with the patterns of conscious or unconscious behaviour of a person, involving their style, preference, skills, knowledge, motor-skills in any domain. In this work I explore the cre- ation of user profiles to be applied in dynamic user identification based on the biometric pat- terns observed during normal Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) by continuously logging and tracking the corresponding computer events. Unlike most of the biometrics systems that need special hardware devices (e.g. finger print reader), HCI-based identification sys- tems can be implemented using regular input devices (mouse or keyboard) and they do not require the user to perform specific tasks to train the system. Specifically, three components are studied in-depth: mouse dynamics, keystrokes dynamics and GUI based user behaviour. In this work I will describe my research on HCI-based behavioural biometrics, discuss the features and models I proposed for each component along with the result of experiments. In addition, I will describe the methodology and datasets I gathered using my LoggerMan application that has been developed specifically to passively gather behavioural biometric data for evaluation. Results show that normal Human-Computer Interaction reveals behavioural information with discriminative power sufficient to be used for user modelling for identification purposes

Consuming the jihad : an enquiry into the subculture of internet jihadism

Recent years have seen a great deal of interest in phenomena such as Al Qaida ‘terrorism’, Islamic ‘radicalism’ or, increasingly, ‘jihadism’ - on the Internet. However, as I argue in this thesis, much work in these areas has been problematic for a number of reasons. Much literature has been narrowly focused on the security issues which it pre-judges the content to raise, and has therefore taken some aspects too literally while ignoring others. Conversely, where authors have addressed ‘jihadi’ content or ‘electronic jihad’ as a phenomenon unto itself, they have had difficulty making sense of it within religious studies or political communication frameworks. In this dissertation, I propose an alternative approach. Deliberately eschewing frameworks based on pre-existing conceptions of religion or politics, I draw, instead, on the academic literature on fandom and subcultural media consumption. Using this conceptual lens, I attempt to analyse jihadism on the Internet (which I define in terms of online consumption of, and identification with self-described ‘jihadi’ content) as a subcultural phenomenon on its own terms. I argue that, without necessarily denying the role that beliefs and ideals expressed in ‘jihadi’ content may sometimes have in sustaining the physical violence of the ‘global jihad’, the cultural practices which constitute Internet jihadism have a tactical logic of their own which may not always coincide with the ‘strategic’ interests of ‘global jihad’. By better understanding what ‘ordinary' jihadis, most of whom will never participate in violence, get out of their practices, and how they negotiate the apparent contradictions of their situation, I suggest that we may be better placed to understand not only why some jihadis ‘fail’ to negotiate these contradictions, but also, perhaps, to raise questions about how popular media consumption works more generally

Personal Finance: Economic Citizenship and Financial form in the Contemporary Novel

My dissertation, “Personal Finance: Economic Citizenship and Financial Form in the Contemporary Novel” theorises the novel’s engagement with the post-1970s financialisation of the economy from the ground up. Contrary to the dominant perception of finance as a turn away from the solidity of industry and production in favour of a realm of hyperbolic abstraction, finance capital emerges in this project as a thickly material concern. My writing follows the money, tracking the way that finance is routed through social forms: urban planning, philanthrocapitalism, migrant access to citizenship in global cities, and the fleshy finance of corporate nanotechnology. These material forms do not replace the abstract form of finance capital; rather, the two must be theorised together. Nowhere is this articulated more eloquently than in the contemporary novel. As a form that has emerged to mediate the relationship between the individual and the social, investigating the broadest economic shifts with the sensitive instrument of character, the contemporary novel is both an essential archive and a highly ambivalent response to new financial realities. A second and related claim of “Personal Finance” concerns the complexity of theorising a mode of capital that is both deeply national and rapaciously global. Critical work on finance in the humanities slips swiftly from identifying the lived experience of finance in a US context to arguing that this financialised form of citizenship will play out identically across the globe. Countering this claim informs both the archive and the methodology of my project. My dissertation reads a set of contemporary US novels that trace the felt experiences of the global economy within North America alongside a set of contemporary novels from the wider Anglophone world. Building on recent theoretical work in literature and economics and urban studies, the emphasis of “Personal Finance” throughout is to unsettle hegemonic claims about the financial, the global, and the national through the material and affective archive of the contemporary novel