Hany Farid


Hany Farid is an American university professor who specializes in the analysis of digital images. 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.

Career

Farid specializes in image analysis and human perception. He has been called the "father" of digital image forensics by NOVA scienceNOW. He is the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2002 Sloan Fellowship for his work in the field. Farid was named a lifetime fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2016.

University positions

Farid is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and the School of Information. He is also a member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Lab, the Center for Innovation in Vision and Optics, and the Vision Science program.
Prior to joining Berkeley, Farid was the Albert Bradley 1915 Third Century Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College 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.

Consulting and media appearances

Farid has consulted for intelligence agencies, news organizations, courts, and scientific journals seeking to authenticate the validity of images. This is critically important because graphics programs, such as Photoshop, are frequently used to crop and to label figures in scientific publications. Such manipulations can be used to alter or disguise the data. In 2009, after digitally analyzing a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle and newspaper, Farid published his findings concluding that "the photo almost certainly was not altered". When the 2012 World Press Photo of the Year was alleged as being "fake", Farid spoke out against the allegation and criticized its underlying method, error level analysis.
As of 2018, Farid was a consultant for the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times, and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency.

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. 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, which was done e.g. to automatically remove al Qaeda videos.

Counter Extremism Project

In June 2016, Farid, as a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project, 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.
To operationalize this new technology to combat extremism, Farid and CEP proposed the creation of a National Office for Reporting Extremism, which would house a comprehensive database of extremist content and function similar to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Truepic

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.
As of February 2019, Farid was an advisor to Truepic.

Education

Farid received his undergraduate degree in computer science and applied mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1989. He earned a M.S. in computer science from SUNY/Albany in 1992. His Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania was awarded in 1997. In 1999, Farid completed a two-year post-doctoral program in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Family

Farid is married to the neuroscientist Emily Cooper. Cooper, also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, studies human vision and virtual reality. Cooper met Farid when he spent a sabbatical from Dartmouth at Berkeley.

Publications

Books