Efe honored for European AI project

Brussels, May 12 (EFE).- Efe, Spain’s international news agency, was recognized here Thursday at the second edition of the Stars4Media awards for a project using artificial intelligence to enhance the value of video content for news outlets.

In an event at Euractiv headquarters in Brussels, Efe was honored along with its collaborators in the initiative: European Pressphoto Agency (epa) and German startup Design AI GmbH.

“Next generation video understanding for news content” uses the Videre AI video analysis tool to improve video tagging and video captioning capabilities.

Videre AI was one of 17 “innovative and relevant” projects selected by Stars4Media from among 101 submissions originating with outlets such as The Guardian, La Repubblica, Vocento, Le Monde, and Euronews.

Stars4Media provided the financing for the project, while videos supplied by Efe and epa constituted the raw material for Design AI’s development of Videre AI into a mechanism capable of cataloguing videos, rendering speech into text across several languages, and automatically generating metadata.

The initiative promises to contribute to the fight against disinformation thanks to its ability to immediately recognize already published video and confirm both the geographic location and time of recording/broadcast.

Along similar lines and also within the Stars4Media framework, Agencia Efe is working with Czech portal HlidaciPes.org to create “Let’s educate on TikTok” – a series of short videos meant to help TikTok users to learn to identify false content.

Co-funded by the European Union, Stars4Media is an innovation exchange program aiming at facilitating cooperation between media professionals and accelerating media innovation and cross-border coverage in Europe. EFE

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