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

The university’s team Game of Nolife won Western European programming contest for students

In the finals in Thailand in spring 2016, the students from the University of Helsinki will face the best teams in the world.

The University of Helsinki has won the inter-university NWERC 2015 programming contest that was held in Linköping recently. It was attended by 95 teams from Western Europe. The Game of Nolife team from the University of Helsinki consisted of computer-science and maths students Tuukka Korhonen, Olli Hirviniemi and Otte Heinävaara.

The Carat research team has published a dataset focusing on collaborative energy diagnostics of mobile devices and applications

 

 

The Carat research team from University of Helsinki publishes a dataset from the Carat project (http://carat.cs.helsinki.fi/) focusing on collaborative energy diagnostics of mobile devices and applications. The dataset was presented at the IEEE PerCom’15 conference last spring in the publication "Energy Modeling of System Settings: A Crowdsourced Approach" that won the Marc Weiser Best Paper Award given at the conference.

Eemil Lagerspetz was awarded a grant by the Jorma Ollila fund of Nokia Foundation on November 24, 2015

 

 
 
Eemil Lagerspetz was awarded a grant by the Jorma Ollila fund of Nokia Foundation on November 24, 2015. Congratulations!
 
The fund was launched in year 2014 to support post doctoral research career development. 
The title of Eemil’s post doctoral research is “Mind The Gap: Combining Trajectory Datasets for a Holistic Picture of Human Mobility” and the research will be carried out at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2016.
 

Collaborative Networking (CoNe) group researchers got the best paper award at 2nd ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2015)

 

Collaborative Networking (CoNe) group researchers got the best paper award at 2nd ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2015), one of the most prestigious venues for ICN research. The article entitled Pro-Diluvian: Understanding Scoped-Flooding for Content Discovery in ICN is lead by Liang Wang - a recent PhD graduate from CoNe research group, and is the outcome of collaboration with Suzan Bayhan and Jussi Kangasharju from UH, Jörg Ott from Aalto University, Arjuna Sathiaseelan and Jon Crowcroft from Cambridge University.