Immersive Automation is probably one of the biggest research and development projects in the field in the world right now. The project aims at automating news production, and is looking for new ways of making it more automatic. It also looks at the ecosystem of news production.
Every day we have tiny robots do more and more things for us. But again, we decide what they do, and we decide how we use them.
See our short presentation video with some thoughts presented by our team:
The project is moving forward and our team has been busy with their research. As the academic year is ending, we want to provide you with some examples of where our work has been presented during the past year. Presentations during the past year Last fall, we gave presentations at several conferences, including Verkkoviestijöiden päivät …
If we are to believe data journalist and data consultant Marco Maas, the future of journalism lies in our surroundings. Most of us would probably not spend the profits from a few successful Bitcoin sales on equipping our homes with various sensors, but that is in fact what German data journalist Marco Maas did some …
I am at yet another conference, hearing yet another presentation of “robot journalism”. I realise that my campaign against this metaphor for news automation was lost long ago. With the use of pictures depicting robots writing on keyboards, sometimes wearing a hat where it says, “Press”, graphical designers, editors, and researchers have managed to establish …
Continue reading ““Robot Journalism”: The damage done by a metaphor”
The Immersive Automation-project is a research consortium where data scientists, linguists, and journalists work together with researchers and media companies to bring forward a solution for producing engaging, data driven content. Our aim is to create a roadmap and a demonstration of a future news ecosystem based on automated storytelling, intense audience engagement, and user experience. The duration of the project is until end of May 2018.
Identification and categorisation of data sources. Special focus on identification of relevant structured data for editorial use.
Development of methods for automated text generation, as well as provision of models for the structure of news stories.
Focus group tests for automatically generated content.
Development of an ecosystem where technical, organizational, as well as commercial levels are both conceptualised and demonstrated.
Training selected journalists in computational thinking, algorithmic news production, and editorial tools based on automation.
The Researchers are presented on the The Research Team-page.
Immersive Automation is funded by The Finnish Funding Agency of Innovation Tekes, The Media Industry Research Foundation of Finland, The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, the media companies involved as well as the research organisations participating in the project.
