Scaling Human Editorial Judgment
Speaker
Dr. Larry Birnbaum
Northwestern University
http://infolab.northwestern.edu/people/larry-birnbaum/
Description
Systems that present people with information inescapably make editorial judgments in determining what information to show and how to show it. However the editorial values used to make these judgments are generally invisible to users and in many cases even to the engineers who design them. This work is aimed at developing news and media information technologies that provide explicit and visible editorial control, at scale. Some of Dr Birnbaum’s most exciting work in this area is aimed at automatically generating stories from data. A system based on this technology is already generating more than 10 thousand stories weekly in areas ranging from sports, to business, to politics. This system is the nation’s most prolific and published author of, among other things, women’s collegiate softball stories. The stories compare favorably to those written by human beings. Dr. Birnbaum will also present some more recent work on news and media technology developed in the Knight Lab, a joint initiative of the Schools of Engineering and Journalism at Northwestern.
Larry Birnbaum is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and of Journalism, at Northwestern University. He is a founder and PI of the Knight Lab, an interdisciplinary center for innovation in news and media technology at Northwestern, as well as co-Director of the Intelligent Information Laboratory there. Larry is also a Founder and Chief Scientific Advisor of Narrative Science Inc. His research encompasses artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, human-computer interaction, and intelligent information systems. He has authored or coauthored more than 130 articles and holds 17 patents. Larry received his B.S and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Yale University (the latter in 1986) and joined the Northwestern faculty in 1989.
Event Topic
Data Science