Human Colossus Joins “SNV on Tour” at EPFL — Deepfake Trust & Verification
On September 23, Human Colossus participated in SNV on Tour at EPFL, an event organized by the Swiss Association for Standardization (SNV). This year's event focused on artificial intelligence and deepfakes, two of the most pressing challenges in today's digital landscape.
The event brought together leaders from academia, industry, government, and civil society to discuss the future of trust, authenticity, and digital integrity in an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and synthetic media.
Our participation highlighted Human Colossus’s commitment to strengthening the foundations of digital trust through technology, standards, collaboration, and international leadership.
Deepfakes and the Three-Fold Strategy of Authenticity
During the event, Professor Touradj Ebrahimi of EPFL presented a clear framework for addressing the growing challenge of deepfakes and manipulated media. He identified three complementary strategies:
Reactive: Detecting manipulation by developing forensic methods for spotting tampering, anomalies, and adversarial examples in audio, video, and images.
Proactive: Authenticity and integrity. This involves embedding cryptographic seals, provenance metadata, or integrity markers directly into content to certify its authenticity at the source.
Collaborative: Verification as a vector of trust. This involves building mechanisms for evidence collection, community-based verification, and shared governance to enable stronger ecosystem responses.
Of these three strategies, the proactive and collaborative approaches align closely with what Human Colossus is building.
Proactive Authenticity: Our work on verifiable provenance, integrity seals, and trustworthy digital infrastructure supports Prof. Ebrahimi’s call to certify authenticity at the source.
Collaborative verification: Human Colossus is pioneering frameworks for evidence sharing, community-driven verification, and governance models that establish verification as a source of trust.
Together, these approaches create a foundation for digital ecosystems that are resilient, transparent, and accountable, going beyond detection alone.
Strengthening Switzerland’s Role in Global Standardization
Another key message was the importance of standardization. Human Colossus is deeply committed to aligning its cutting-edge solutions with international frameworks to ensure interoperability and long-term sustainability.
At SNV on Tour, we reaffirmed our dedication to:
supporting Switzerland’s role as a hub for neutrality, transparency, and innovation in standardization.
actively contributing to European and global discussions on content authenticity and trustworthy AI;
shaping common protocols so that authenticity systems can scale across borders and industries.
This work strengthens Switzerland’s leadership in EU and global standardization and ensures that trust technologies evolve with fairness, accountability, and technical rigor.
Looking Ahead
Participating in SNV on Tour reinforced the importance of collaboration among technology providers, policymakers, researchers, and communities. Tackling deepfakes and synthetic media requires a multidisciplinary approach. It is not just an engineering problem, but a societal challenge that requires reactive detection, proactive authenticity, and collaborative verification.
Human Colossus is dedicated to building infrastructures of trust and contributing to standardization processes that ensure reliability, interoperability, and future-proofing.
