% Acknowledgements

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Acknowledgements}
\begin{center}
{\bf ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS}
\end{center}
I express my deepest gratitude to my thesis supervisor, \textbf{Dr. Debasish Pradhan}, for his invaluable guidance, constructive feedback, and unwavering support throughout this research journey.

I am profoundly grateful to the \textbf{Defence Institute of Advanced Technology (DIAT)} for providing the research infrastructure, computational resources, and academic environment that enabled this work. The institute’s commitment to advancing defense technologies and fostering innovative research has been invaluable.

I acknowledge the contributions of the broader research community whose open-source datasets, pre-trained models, and published methodologies formed the foundation of this research. Special thanks to:

\begin{itemize}
    \item The developers of the \textbf{FaceForensics++}, \textbf{FakeAVCeleb}, and \textbf{DeepFake Detection Challenge (DFDC)} datasets for establishing standardized benchmarks for visual and cross-modal forensics.
    \item The creators of \textbf{FakeNewsNet, ISOT, and LIAR} datasets for enabling text-based disinformation research.
    \item The teams behind \textbf{CLIP, CLAP, DistilBERT, and AASIST} for their transformative pre-trained models.
    \item \textbf{Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic} for providing access to Gemini 2.0 Flash, GPT-4, and Claude APIs.
    \item The developers of critical open-source libraries including \textbf{PyTorch, OpenCV, FFmpeg, and SerpAPI}, which served as the backbone of our experimental pipeline.
\end{itemize}

I am grateful to my colleagues and peers who engaged in discussions, provided feedback on methodologies, and contributed to the refinement of this work through their insightful critiques. The collaborative environment at DIAT fostered intellectual growth and methodological rigor.

I acknowledge the intelligence and defense communities whose real-world challenges motivated this research and whose feedback on practical deployment considerations shaped the system’s design.

This research represents not just an academic exercise but a contribution toward addressing a critical challenge facing democratic societies and international stability in the information age. I hope this work serves as a foundation for future innovations in countering weaponized disinformation.

%\vspace*{0.1in}


