VIS Media: In silicon there is truth

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Italy | Project Type: Large | VIS Media | Amount Awarded: €350,000

A new system currently being pioneered by one of Italy’s leading publishers could revolutionise the fact-checking process for journalists while also becoming a revenue generator in its own right.


“Our group has 360 journalists and even more freelancers who produce thousands of stories for print and the web each day,” says Alvise Zanardi, Project Director at CEDS Digital, part of Caltagirone Editore which publishes six newspapers and their associated websites. “This team draws on input from a huge range of sources including social media, the internet, agencies and other publishers. Fact checking these sources needs knowledge and a thorough verification process, and that takes time and resources. Our editors wanted to see if we could develop an interface that could help journalists check facts in real time – and which used machine learning to become faster and more accurate over the months and years.”

Our editors wanted to see if we could develop an interface that could help journalists check facts in real time – and which used machine learning to become faster and more accurate over the months and years.

Alvise Zanardi
Project Director, CEDS Digtial & Servizi part of Caltagirone Editore
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As a name, Veritas In Silico (VIS, or In Silicon There is Truth) neatly explains the project’s objectives. Supported by the DNI Fund as well as investments from the publisher, VIS is currently in the testing phase, with go-live anticipated by January 2019. At that point, VIS is likely to be a text-only solution, using semantic recognition to check the veracity of different sources and identify the most relevant one. But as the project progresses, Alvise and his team are keen to explore how the capabilities of VIS could be extended to embrace photographs and video by using a mix of facial, image and keyword recognition technologies.


“Looking at the business opportunities, our digital department is already experienced in selling IT services to the broader market in Italy. We believe that VIS has great commercial potential to improve quality and cut costs – as machine learning improves the quality of VIS, we’ll be evaluating how we can best market it.”

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DNI Fund Report 2018

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