Interview with Beat Signer

Beat Signer is Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and co-director of the Web & Information Systems Engineering (WISE) research lab. He received a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich where he has also been leading the Interactive Paper lab as a senior researcher for four years. He is an internationally distinguished expert in cross-media technologies and interactive paper solutions. His further research interests include human-information interaction, document engineering, data physicalisation, mixed reality as well as multimodal interaction. He has published more than 100 papers on these topics at international conferences and journals, and received multiple best paper awards. Beat has 20 years of experience in research on cross-media information management and multimodal user interfaces. As part of his PhD research, he investigated the use of paper as an interactive user interface and developed the resource-selector-link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel. With the interactive paper platform (iPaper), he strongly contributed to the interdisciplinary European Paper++ and PaperWorks research projects and the seminal research on paper-digital user interfaces led to innovative cross-media publishing solutions and novel forms of paper-based human-computer interaction. The RSL hypermedia metamodel is nowadays widely applied in his research lab and has, for example, been used for cross-media personal information management, an extensible cross-document link service, the MindXpres presentation platform as well as in a framework for cross-device and Internet of Things applications. For more details, please visit https://beatsigner.com.

Cross-Media Publishing and Storytelling

Technological evolution on digital content processing and mediated communication has created multiple publication means, which can be employed for information channeling and dissemination. The present chapter analyzes in detail the important topic of cross-media publishing and storytelling that resulted in changes in the news reporting chain and created new ways of making journalism. It also involved fundamental changes in both ends of media production and consumption and consequently in the way that informing streams arrive to the end users. Taking into consideration that journalistic organizations utilize all the available propagation paths to spread their product, this section discusses the historic evolution of cross-media, defining multi-channel publishing procedures and presenting the various devices which can be utilized as receiving terminals. As a final point, the cross-modal attributes of the presented paradigms are studied for their potential usefulness in multimodal integrated authentication solutions.

Introduction to Cross-Media Authentication and Verification

The current chapter provides an overview of the objectives being covered in this book, introducing the reader to the values of cross-media authentication in journalism and generally in informing services. Misinformation has social and economic consequences in every aspect of human activity, with critical political implication. The dominance of cross-media publishing and storytelling and the contemporary forms of digital journalism have shaped a new media landscape, raising certain question regarding the applied authentication and verification strategies. While media veracity has received a lot of attention during the last years, content verification practices need to be further supported, adapting to the diverse character of multiple media and sources. The utmost goal of this introductory chapter is to unveil the potentials of an interdisciplinary exploitation of current advantages in multi-channel storytelling and their integration in cross-media veracity strategies, where best practices can be combined with state-of-the-art computational technologies and algorithmic solutions.