News production becomes automatic – meta editors are coming

News production is changing as the routine parts of editorial work are being automated. The University of Helsinki and VTT will explore how interesting and high-quality news can be produced automatically, as well as what kind of new user experiences can be offered.

In order to serve the increasingly demanding audiences in multiple digital channels, media houses are trying to automate the most routine editorial work. This way, the editors can concentrate on writing more challenging special stories and giving their audiences opportunities to immerse themselves in increasingly personalized news experiences.

The University of Helsinki and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd will research automatic news production where a personalised news experience is enabled by data and machine learning. Hyper locality and audience participation are the key elements here.

“Semi-automatic solutions will be the common practice: the editor will finalise the automatically produced text and define templates for automatic news generating programs. In the future, all editors will be, to some extent, meta editors”, believes VTT’s research professor Caj Södergård.

The degree of automation rises gradually

So far, automation has been trialed in news production by big actors, such as the American press agency AP (Associated Press), with writing analyses of financial statements for example. In addition to financial news, sports news is already automatically produced around the world.

“One can expect that producing other types of news can be automated up to a certain point depending on the availability of data. More demanding journalism – such as leading articles and in-depth articles – will remain the task of human journalists,” states the journalism researcher Carl-Gustav Lindén from Swedish School of Social Science, part of the University of Helsinki. 

“The University of Helsinki studies how data science can be applied to news production and its automation. We develop tools based on data mining and machine learning for journalists to streamline their work,” tells professor Hannu Toivonen from the department of computer science at University of Helsinki.

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd studies how automatically produced content affects the audience and what promotes and prevents an immersive experience. VTT is also responsible for the demonstration of a news ecosystem and studies new ways to distribute content in cooperation with the technology companies participating in the project.

The main financier of the Immersive Automation project is Tekes through their Media remake program. Other financiers of the project are Media Industry Research Foundation of Finland, The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, Sanoma, Alma Media, Conmio, Keski-Pohjanmaan Kirjapaino, and KSF Media as well as the research institutions.

 

Immersive Automation project website: immersiveautomation.com

 

Photo: Cata Portin

 

 

Created date

07.02.2017 - 18:29

Mobile cloud computing makes data centres obsolete

Researcher Eemil Lagerspetz intends to move computing from computers to pocket devices and from data centres to homes.

Implementing cloud computing with mobile devices is being studied at the University of Helsinki. Mobile cloud computing refers to computing with smartphones or other mobile or Internet of Things devices in the environment, such as smart TVs or smart fridges. Without mobile devices, cloud computing means carrying out large tasks on computers linked together by network connections. In traditional computing, the tasks are carried out with computers that are physically located in the same space.

 

Workshop on Mobile Services and Edge Computing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 3rd Helsinki-HKUST-Tsinghua workshop was chaired by Professor Sasu Tarkoma from University of Helsinki and Dr. Aaron Yi Ding from Technical University of Munich. The workshop was held at the University of Helsinki from July 27th to 29th, 2016.

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Professor Esko Ukkonen invited to the Estonian Academy of Sciences

Professor Esko Ukkonen has been invited to the Estonian Academy of Sciences as a foreign member.

Esko Ukkonen has had contacts to the computer science community in Estonia from the beginning of the 1990s, and he has supervised the work of several Estonian postgraduates. The Estonian Academy of Sciences has 78 ordinary and 21 foreign members.

The First Europe-China Workshop on Big Data Management

Some attenders of this workshopThe first Europe-China workshop on big data management was successfully held on the 16th of May, 2016 at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. 

This one-day workshop organized by Prof. Jiaheng Lu (University of Helsinki), Prof. Xiaoyong Du (Renmin University of China), and Prof. Christian S. Jensen (Aalborg University, Denmark). The aims of this workshop were to gather experts in big data management to exchange views on cutting-edge data management problems and create opportunities for establishing new collaborations between EU and China computer scientists.