Industry Keynote Speakers
Media integrity and literacy in the age of GenAI & Deepfakes
Christoph Bregler
Senior Director & Distinguished Scientist, Google DeepMind
Abstract:
The rise of generative AI has democratized media creation, bringing huge promise but also possible perils. While this may seem like a new problem, the generation and manipulation of media has a long history that predates the current AI boom. I’ll discuss key insights from our multi-year analysis of content that people shared online. Looking at manipulations such as deepfakes and cheapfakes, as well as misleading contextual manipulations, I’ll reveal surprising statistics that challenge common assumptions about the most prevalent types of problematic media. I’ll then explore mitigation strategies, including ways to improve information literacy tools, the opportunities and limitations of using AI to detect manipulated content, and how provenance methods paired with AI can help address out-of-context manipulations. Finally, I’ll introduce an AI-based tool that can provide additional context for the media we encounter online every day.
Bio:Chris Bregler is a Senior Director and Distinguished Scientist at Google DeepMind. In 2016, he received an Academy Award in the Oscars’ Science and Technology category for his visual effects work that has been used in movies including Avatar, Avengers, Star Trek, and Star Wars. He has been involved in one of the earliest so-called DeepFake technologies, notably as the creator of the landmark VideoRewrite project, which demonstrated how AI can manipulate video and alter spoken words. At Google DeepMind, he leads efforts to combat societally harmful DeepFakes and advance media integrity and information literacy efforts. He received the IEEE Longuet-Higgins Prize for “Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision that Have Withstood the Test of Time,” the DAGM Olympus Prize, and awards from the National Science Foundation, Packard Foundation, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, IARPA, and other agencies. Formerly a professor at New York University and Stanford University, he was named Sloan Research Fellow, Stanford Joyce Faculty Fellow, and Terman Fellow. In addition to working for Interval Research, Disney Feature Animation, LucasFilm’s ILM, Facebook’s Oculus, and the New York Times, he was the executive producer of squid-ball.com, for which he built the world’s largest real-time motion capture volume. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley.
Solving Critical Real-World Business Challenges – NEC’s Industrial Research Model in the AI Era
Yasunori Mochizuki
NEC Fellow & Managing Director of R&D, NEC Corporation
Abstract:
NEC is the leading ICT provider in the B-to-B market and is actively integrating cutting-edge technologies into its business solutions to drive innovation, enhance capabilities, and create new value for its customers in a broad spectrum of industrial segments. And the recent business focus of NEC is to support the digital transformation of business processes of customer enterprises by leveraging technical capabilities in AI, Cyber Security and Communication. This keynote discusses the specific role of NEC’s Research in such a business context by sharing a variety of generative and multimodal AI-related use cases that are aimed at solving critical customer challenges in the real world. From the multimedia perspective, the topics will include world-leading facial recognition technology for a security boost and enhanced customer experience, development of drive-recorder video analytics for insurance adjusters leveraging a visual language model (VLM) and a medical document generation AI service for genuinely supporting overworked clinical doctors. Meanwhile, distributed acoustic sensing technology using optical fiber cables is opening a new opportunity for infrastructure and incident monitoring solutions after integration with AI and ML algorithms. As the common denominator, our commitment of solving critical customer challenges requires (and justifies) nurturing both world-class excellence in performing academic research and accumulated experience and/or culture of application-oriented technology refinement, as well as technology combination to ensure business-ready practicality. Also, being an industrial research organization, we are engaged at the forefront of customer co-creation and co-design that play an indispensable role in pinpointing customers’ critical challenges. These expertise and practices are indeed the core ingredients of NEC’s Research for creating new business opportunities from the technology innovation approach. Furthermore, we also envision that such an industrial lab model in the Generative AI era will become the driver of a new technology paradigm – industry segment-oriented customizable foundation models and business-transforming Agentic AI framework.
Bio:Yasunori Mochizuki is an experienced management leader in the IT sector with his technology and business innovation expertise, and he is currently the NEC Fellow (Corporate Executive) & Managing Director for R&D Division at NEC Corporation. In this position, Yasunori is responsible for managing NEC’s global R&D activity including AI, security and communication technologies. Yasunori was also actively engaged in the policy recommendations on AI Governance and Data Privacy including that for Metaverse being a member of the Committee for Digital Economy Policy of “Business at OECD” (BIAC) from 2019 to 2024. Prior to the current appointment, he was the Senior Vice President from 2016 to 2019 responsible for corporate-wide coordination of NEC’s technology innovation strategy as well as IoT business strategy. In his career, Yasunori has 25+ years of experience in NEC’s Corporate Research, where he took the leadership both as a research scientist and later as a Director/VP in accelerating commercialization of world-class research outcomes in the diverse technology domains including semiconductor/LSI devices, ICT systems and AI-oriented computer science. He is the author/speaker of 150+ academic journal papers, conference presentations and keynotes, and also is a thought leader for digital transformation of both businesses and cities/communities speaking at numerous business events, seminars and panels hosted by international organizations and governments (incl. G7-satellite, OECD, World Economic Forum, United Cities and Local Governments). Yasunori Mochizuki received his BS, MS and PhD from the Electronics Engineering Department of the University of Tokyo in 1982, 1984 and 1987, respectively. He is a Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP) Fellow and an Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) Industrial Distinguished Leader.