L2M Validate / Qc Winter 2026 / Smooth Detector: Combating Fake News in the Society with AI

The Smooth Detector project addresses the urgent problem of multimodal misinformation, fake news that combines misleading text and manipulated images, which spreads rapidly across social media and overwhelms small news organizations, fact-checkers, and public health agencies that lack the resources to combat it effectively. Smooth Detector analyzes posts across multiple formats simultaneously, identifying subtle inconsistencies that reveal forgeries, such as persuasive text paired with mismatched images. Unlike existing tools that provide simple yes/no answers, Smooth Detector returns confidence scores that help users prioritize which content needs urgent human review and which can be safely published or automatically flagged. The system is designed to be affordable and easy to use, delivered as a simple plugin for WordPress and Drupal websites or as a cloud-based API, making advanced detection accessible to community newsrooms, independent bloggers, and regional health communicators who currently have no practical defense against sophisticated misinformation. This MITACS internship will accelerate commercialization by executing customer pilots with 3-5 partner organizations, building the technical integrations (plugins and dashboards) that non-technical users need, collecting real-world performance data to validate detection accuracy and time savings, and developing the business materials required for market entry and investor fundraising. The expected benefit to Smooth Detector is a validated, market-ready product with proven customer demand, deployed infrastructure, documented impact through case studies, and strategic partnerships that position us to scale across Canada’s 7,000+ community news outlets and 600+ million blogs worldwide. This directly supports our mission to democratize misinformation defense and protect public trust in critical information sources.

Faculty Supervisor:

Nizar Bouguila

Student:

Partner:

V1 Studio

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Education

University:

Concordia University

Program: