[3] In addition to teaching, writing, and conducting research, Farid acts as a consultant for non-profits, government agencies, and news organizations.
[3] He remains professor at the University of California, Berkeley with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and the School of Information.
[12] Farid has consulted for intelligence agencies, news organizations, courts, and scientific journals seeking to authenticate the validity of images.
[19] Politically motivated faked images may be used to present disinformation and hate speech, and to undermine the credibility of media, government and elections.
[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".
[25] In 2020, Farid and Matyáš Boháček trained a computer model to detect fake videos of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
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."
[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."
[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.
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.