Science on Tap to focus on fake video detection through physics
Thursday, August 20, 2015
by: Rene Abadie
HAMMOND – How to detect fake videos using physics will be the focus of Southeastern
Louisiana University’s next Science on Tap seminar, scheduled Tuesday, Sept. 1
Now in its third year of monthly informal science presentations, Science on Tap
is sponsored by Southeastern’s Department of Biological Sciences. The presentations,
which cover a variety of physical and biological topics, will be held at 7 p.m. at
Tope lá Catering, 113 East Thomas St., in Hammond. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. The presentation
is free and open to all ages.
“Internet is full of videos and many of these are not real,” explained physicist
Rhett Allain, who is presenting the lecture. “Everyone knows that many movie trailers
aren’t actually real and neither are video games. There are also some videos that
seem so incredible that we think they must be fake, but that’s not necessarily so.
Finally, there are seemingly simple videos that were created just to fool people into
believing they are real.”
An associate professor of physics and frequent contributor to “Wired” magazine,
Allain said people are often left with the question of whether a video is real or
fake.
“Fortunately, we have the tools to answer this question,” he added. “With video
analysis and some fundamental physics principles, we will investigate several interesting
online videos.”
For more information on future Science on Tap presentations, contact the Department
of Biological Sciences at 985-549-3740.