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The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that in the United States, up to 30-40 percent of the food supply is wasted. Food waste occurs due to many factors, whether from issues at the milling, drying, and transportation challenges at the farm level or storage malfunctions or over ordering issues at the retail level, to name a few. To help combat food loss, the USDA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set a goal in 2015 to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2030.

The past 20 years have seen numerous epidemics break out across the globe: SARS, H1N1, Ebola, Zika, and most recently, COVID-19. These diseases have impacted the lives of billions, and have caused millions of deaths around the world. A multitude of factors can cause an infectious disease to develop and spread, including climate and poor sanitation, but even with knowledge of these factors it is difficult to predict when outbreaks will occur.

It has been said that “seeing is believing,” but in the age of social media, viral videos, and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, can we truly believe what we see on the internet? Computer science researchers at the University of Maryland have invented a “Deepfake Detection Tool” to help answer that question.