An app designed to detect deepfakes took home the grand prize at PennApps XX, beating nearly 250 tech projects developed over the course of a weekend. The top three team members took home a bevy of tech items, software subscriptions, and gift cards; nearly $100,000 worth of prizes were award across a variety of technical categories.
Team DeFake: Aarati Srikumar, Daniel Li, George Diwan and Sofiya Lysenko (Image: Penn Engineering)
PennApps, the nation’s first student-run college hackathon, was founded in 2009 and has been running biannual invitational events since. Contestants from around the world arrive on a Friday afternoon, form teams and come up with ideas for digital apps or hardware projects, which they must complete before a demo session on Sunday morning. There, the projects are evaluated by a panel of tech industry judges, who rate them on originality, technical difficulty, polish, and usefulness.
This year’s winning project was DeFake, a browser extension that uses machine learning to assess the likelihood that a given video has been subtly manipulated. Deepfakes are a new method of using artificial intelligence to impersonate famous figures, using pre-existing video and audio clips to generate photo-realistic fabrications. Worried about deepfakes being “particularly influential in the outcome of this and future elections,” the team “wanted to develop a level of protection and reality for users.”
Materials in the Annenberg School for Communication Library Archives include thousands of TV scripts, the first issue of TV Guide, and interviews about the early days of HBO—which help to chronicle TV’s 100-year story.
Centering joy in AI development and implementation
PIK Professor Desmond Upton Patton—of Annenberg and SP2—and collaborators introduce a joy-informed framework designed to initiate conversations among engineers, designers, and researchers.
Winter Storm Fern brought icy and snowy conditions to the Northeast and other parts of the country over the weekend. Penn Today asks physicist Robert Carpick about the unique properties of ice, the science of curling, and how close we are to ‘nonslip’ ice.
Organizations like Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships foster collaborations between Penn and public schools in the West Philadelphia community.
Penn receives national distinction for community engagement
The recognition by the American Council on Education and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching acknowledges Penn’s long-standing commitment to community-engaged scholarship and partnerships in West Philadelphia and beyond.
