Image and Video Forensics

Nowadays, images and videos have become the main modalities of information being exchanged in everyday life, and their pervasiveness has led the image forensics community to question their reliability, integrity, confidentiality, and security. Multimedia contents are generated in many different ways through the use of consumer electronics and high-quality digital imaging devices, such as smartphones, digital cameras, tablets, and wearable and IoT devices. The ever-increasing convenience of image acquisition has facilitated instant distribution and sharing of digital images on digital social platforms, determining a great amount of exchange data. Moreover, the pervasiveness of powerful image editing tools has allowed the manipulation of digital images for malicious or criminal ends, up to the creation of synthesized images and videos with the use of deep learning techniques. In response to these threats, the multimedia forensics community has produced major research efforts regarding the identification of the source and the detection of manipulation. In all cases (e.g., forensic investigations, fake news debunking, information warfare, and cyberattacks) where images and videos serve as critical evidence, forensic technologies that help to determine the origin, authenticity, and integrity of multimedia content can become essential tools. This book aims to collect a diverse and complementary set of articles that demonstrate new developments and applications in image and video forensics to tackle new and serious challenges to ensure media authenticity

Computer Aided Verification

This open access two-volume set LNCS 13371 and 13372 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 34rd International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2022, which was held in Haifa, Israel, in August 2022. The 40 full papers presented together with 9 tool papers and 2 case studies were carefully reviewed and selected from 209 submissions. The papers were organized in the following topical sections: Part I: Invited papers; formal methods for probabilistic programs; formal methods for neural networks; software Verification and model checking; hyperproperties and security; formal methods for hardware, cyber-physical, and hybrid systems. Part II: Probabilistic techniques; automata and logic; deductive verification and decision procedures; machine learning; synthesis and concurrency. This is an open access book

Managing the Paradox of Growth in Brand Communities Through Social Media

The commercial benefits of online brand communities are an important focus for marketers seeking deeper engagement with increasingly elusive consumers. Managing participation in these socially bound brand conversations challenges practitioners to balance authenticity towards the community against corporate goals. This is important as social media proliferation affords communities the capacity to reach a scale well beyond their offline equivalents and to operate independently of brands. While research has identified the important elements of engagement in brand communities, less is known about how strategies required to maximise relationships in these circumstances must change with growth. Using a case study approach, we examine how a rapidly growing firm and its community have managed the challenges of a maturing relationship. We find that, in time, the community becomes self-sustaining, and a new set of marketing management strategies is required to move engagement to the next level

Translation and trust: a case study of how translation was experienced by foreign nationals resident in Japan for the 2011 great east Japan earthquake

This thesis examines translation and interpreting in a particular context: the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Motivated by the researcher’s experience of being resident in Tokyo when the disaster struck, a study was carried out to better understand translation and interpreting in this context using the case of foreign residents who experienced the disaster. A constructivist philosophical approach and the academic traditions of ethnography were adopted when designing the case study, and face-to-face, individual interviews with 28 participants from 12 nationalities (Irish, Dutch, French, German, Sudanese, Tunisian, Chinese, Bangladeshi, American, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealander) made up its core primary data. The diverse linguistic and demographic profiles of these participants provided access to multiple perspectives on the objects of enquiry. These perspectives were then analysed over six phases of thematic analysis to describe and explain how foreign residents communicated and gathered information, how translation and interpreting formed part of these activities, and why any of this was important. The analysis suggested that the objects of enquiry can best be understood as written and oral interlingual and intercultural transfer, dominated by the Japanese-English language pair, carried out mostly by volunteers known to the user, to create products that were not always received as translations, but that were valorised when seen to produce timely information of adequate quality. It also suggested that a lack of sufficient resources and a strongly culturally-bound space of interaction created problems for translation and interpreting. Furthermore, the analysis revealed that trust was a significant category in these data. For this reason, a socio-cognitive model of trust was selected and applied to the data to describe and explain the role that translation and interpreting played in some foreign residents’ decisions to trust and to argue for the importance of these phenomena to the existence of trust in this and other disasters