Hany Farid (born February 10, 1966) [1] is an American university professor who specializes in the analysis of digital images and the detection of digitally manipulated images such as deepfakes.[2] Farid served as Dean and Head of School for the UC Berkeley School of Information.[3] In addition to teaching, writing, and conducting research, Farid acts as a consultant for non-profits, government agencies, and news organizations. He is the author of the book Photo Forensics (2016).[4]
Prior to joining Berkeley, Farid was the Albert Bradley 1915 Third Century Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College[11] and former chair of Dartmouth's Neukom Institute for Computational Science. Farid was well-known at Dartmouth for teaching the college's introductory course on programming and computer science. Joseph Helble, dean of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, described Farid as a pioneer in the field of digital forensics. Farid joined Dartmouth's faculty in 1999. He remained at Dartmouth until 2019.[12]
Farid has consulted for intelligence agencies, news organizations, courts, and scientific journals seeking to authenticate the validity of images.[13][14][15] Research shows that humans aren't very good at discriminating between fakes and real photographs.[16][17][18] Faked images may be produced for a variety of purposes: deepfakes are often used to fake the identify of a person in pornographic materials.[19] Politically motivated faked images may be used to present disinformation and hate speech, and to undermine the credibility of media, government and elections.[20] Authenticating figures in scientific publications is critically important because graphics programs, such as Photoshop, are frequently used to crop and to label figures. Such manipulations can be used to alter, disguise, and falsify the data.[21]
In a series of papers in 2009, 2010 and 2015, after digitally analyzing a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle and newspaper, Farid concluded [22][23] that "the photo almost certainly was not altered".[24] When the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was alleged as being a "fake" composite work, Farid spoke out against the allegation and criticized the underlying method of error level analysis.[25] In 2020, Farid and Matyáš Boháček trained a computer model to detect fake videos of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.[2][26][27]
PhotoDNA is a system that uses robust hashing technology Farid worked on with Microsoft, which is "now widely used by Internet companies to stop the spread of content showing sexual exploitation or pornography involving children." In late 2015, Farid completed improvements to PhotoDNA that made it capable of analyzing video and audio files besides still images. In 2016, Farid proposed that the technology could be used to stem the spread of terror-related imagery, but there was little interest shown initially by social media companies.[28] In December 2016, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft announced plans to use PhotoDNA to tackle extremist content such as terrorist recruitment videos or violent terrorist imagery.[29]
In June 2016, Farid, as a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), unveiled a software tool for use by Internet and social media companies to "quickly find and eliminate extremist content used to spread and incite violence and attacks." It functions similarly to PhotoDNA.[30][31][32]
To operationalize this new technology to combat extremism, Farid and CEP proposed the creation of a National Office for Reporting Extremism (NORex), which would house a comprehensive database of extremist content and function similar to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children .[33][34]
In the fall of 2018, Truepic acquired Farid's start-up, Fourandsix Technologies. Farid started Fourandsix Technologies with Kevin Connor, a former vice president at Adobe Systems. The first product released by Fourandsix was called Fourmatch. Fourmatch was designed to detect alterations of digital images. The primary use of Fourmatch was to check the authenticity of images introduced as evidence in court.[35]
As of February 2019, Farid was an advisor to Truepic.[36] The underlying idea behind the Truepic approach is to automatically verify a photo when it is taken, with camera-based apps that assess the image using proprietary algorithms. Later versions of the image can be compared against the original to detect alteration. If this type of verification technology becomes an industry standard, it could help news and social media websites, insurers and others to automatically screen images they receive.[37]
Farid was born to Egyptian parents in Germany.[38] He grew up in Rochester, New York. He is married to the neuroscientist Emily Cooper. Cooper, also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, studies human vision and virtual reality.[39] Cooper met Farid when he spent a sabbatical from Dartmouth at Berkeley.[40]
Johnson, M K and H Farid, Exposing Digital Forgeries in Complex Lighting Environments, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 2:3 (2007) 450-461.[41]
Johnson, M K and H Farid, Exposing Digital Forgeries Through Specular Highlights on the Eye, 9th International Workshop on Information Hiding, Saint Malo, France (2007).[41]
Lyu, S, D Rockmore, and H Farid, A Digital Technique for Art Authentication, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101:49 (2004) 17006-17010.[41]
“The information apocalypse”, Hany Farid, Knowable Magazine. March 14, 2020
