Location

MIT Media Lab, E14-633

Description

Systems that present people with information inescapably make editorial judgments in determining what information to show and how to show it. However, the editorial values used to make these determinations are generally invisible to users and in many cases even to the engineers who design them. This talk describes some of the problems that this creates, based mainly on an assessment of mistakes, and presents some technologies for providing explicit and visible editorial control in news and media information systems.
Birnbaum will also talk about his recent work on automatically generating stories from data based on human editorial judgment. A system based on this technology is already generating more than 10,000 stories weekly in areas ranging from sports to business. This system is the nation’s most prolific and published author of, among other things, women’s collegiate softball stories. The stories compare favorably to those written by human beings.

Biographies

Larry Birnbaum is associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of journalism at Northwestern University; serves on the management committee of the Medill-McCormick Center for Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism; and is the interim executive director of the new Knight News Innovation Laboratory. He is also the chief scientific advisor of Narrative Science Inc. He received his BS, MS, and PhD in computer science from Yale.