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:
In March, our industry report on news automation for WAN-IFRA (The world association of newspapers and news publishers) was published and immediately picked up by Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. We as researchers consider this an exciting opportunity to reach a much larger audience. The report is written for members of WAN-IFRA, but will be published …
Continue reading “We are featured in Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab”
By Aino Pekkarinen Researchers at the University of Helsinki are developing news automation and information retrieval from text masses in cooperation with five other universities and the Finnish News Agency STT. How to automatically find the essential content of news in various languages? How might a computer produce news smoothly, and does technology adapt to …
By Hanna Tuulonen After two years of hard work and excellent results, the Immersive Automation research project received a worthy final seminar with quests from all over Europe. One of the seminar’s most expected quests was David Caswell, executive product manager of BBC News Labs and founder of Structured Stories. BBC News Labs was founded …
Continue reading ““Automation enables journalists do things that ordinary people cannot do””
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.
