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

Top research

The research at the department combines theory with interaction with the application fields in a well-balanced whole. Both the department and Basic Research Unit in the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology were awarded the highest grade in the research review carried out in 2005. Algodan (Algorithmic Data Analysis) is a national Finnish Academy centre of excellence 2008-2013.

Innovative teaching

The Finnish Higher Education Council re-elected the department as a national centre of excellence in higher education, this time for the years 2010-2012. The status of centre of excellence is a significant achievement. It was only conferred on 10 units in Finland this time, and the department was one of two units that were selected for their second period.

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Starting this Friday, you can visit the Department of Computer Science virtually. An adapted facsimile of the Exactum building and the Kumpula Science Library based on their ground plans has been made for the Second Life virtual world. In Second Life, anyone can visit the premises of the Department of Computer Science.

Biomine received funding from Tekes

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