Current & Previous Work
OCCRP & Panama Papers
As an ICFJ Knight Fellow embedded with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, I was a member of the data analysis team that created and published the Panama Papers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and the UK's Investigation of the Decade Award, and I built its high-redundancy publishing infrastructure.
Across two years in Sarajevo and the post-Soviet states I applied OSINT and large-scale data analysis to multilingual financial documents, shipping manifests, and legal records, and ran security infrastructure, training, and incident response for newsrooms working under hostile governments.
MediaVault
I designed, built, and ran MediaVault, a real-time archive of fact-checked social media imagery: custom scrapers, ML-augmented reverse image and video search, and embeddable archive pages. Over its production life it preserved more than 21,000 videos and images for 500+ journalists and researchers in nearly 100 countries.
Security Practice
Since 2017 I have run an independent security practice for journalists, aid workers, and NGOs facing nation-state adversaries: digital and physical security training, threat modeling, and incident response across more than a dozen countries, in partnership with GIJN, ICFJ, and DCN Global.
Fact-Checking Infrastructure: ClaimReview, MediaReview, and Share the Facts
At the Duke Reporters' Lab I co-developed ClaimReview and MediaReview, the open standards that now label fact-checks and manipulated media across Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, carrying work from hundreds of fact-checking organizations worldwide. The Share the Facts widget system I architected served 40+ international newsrooms with millions of daily requests, peaking above one million views per minute during major political events.
AMMeBa
Co-author of AMMeBa: A Large-Scale Survey and Dataset of Media-Based Misinformation In-The-Wild (arXiv, 2024), one of the largest studies of real-world media-based misinformation, including the rise of AI-generated imagery.
Winnow Technologies
I co-founded Winnow Technologies and led it as CTO, building social media monitoring and AI/ML analysis for financial regulators and central banks in the developing world: custom scrapers, ETL pipelines, and complaint-pattern models, delivered on-premises and in the cloud to institutional clients.
Guesswork
My boutique consulting practice at the intersection of technology, AI, policy, and journalism. Clients have ranged from central bank regulators in the Philippines, Mexico, and Indonesia to healthcare microfinancing and emergency dispatch in East Africa and disaster communications in the US.
Squash and FactStream
Squash was a cloud-based computational fact-checking system (real-time speech-to-text, speaker identification, and AI claim matching) that ran live during national presidential debates and State of the Union broadcasts. Its companion second-screen app, FactStream (4.5+ stars, 3,000+ App Store reviews), delivered live fact-checks to iPhone and iPad in partnership with PolitiFact and The Washington Post. Both are completed projects; the research they carried is now industry practice.
