The End of “Seeing is Believing” – Securing Identity in the Age of Generative AI by Richa Singh

Venue: SIT001

Online Link: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/4492945053702?p=Gz8szja9ebX7NoIitC

Abstract: “In an era where AI can synthesize hyper-realistic faces and voices, does the axiom ‘seeing is believing’ still hold water?” This question strikes at the very foundation of digital trust. Over a two-decade journey in biometrics, contributing to large-scale systems like India’s Aadhaar and national security applications, I have watched the challenges evolve from simple identification to complex verification. We have moved from solving “hard” recognition cases, such as matching photos to forensic sketches or identifying individuals after plastic surgery and severe injury, to confronting a far more insidious threat: the weaponization of generative AI. In this talk, I will dissect the mechanics of this new adversarial landscape. I will present our work on detecting multimodal forgeries, analyzing subtle visual artifacts, temporal inconsistencies, and acoustic anomalies in multilingual synthetic speech. Finally, I will widen the lens to discuss the policy frameworks required to survive this shift—proposing a roadmap for digital identity that balances technical robustness with fairness, bias mitigation, and data sovereignty.

Biography: Richa Singh is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Jodhpur. Her research spans responsible artificial intelligence, machine learning, pattern recognition, biometrics, and medical image analysis. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, IAPR, NASI, and INAE, and is an ACM Distinguished Member. Her honors include the NASSCOM AI Gamechangers Award and the Facebook Award for Ethics in AI. She is Founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM AI Letters and Associate Editor-in-Chief of Pattern Recognition. She has served as organizing committee member of several conferences including PC Co-Chair of CVPR 2022and also served as Vice President (Publications) of the IEEE Biometrics Council.