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. Our work is aimed at developing news and media information technologies that provide explicit and visible editorial control, at scale. Some of our 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.

Larry Birnbaum received his PhD in computer science from Yale University in 1986, and joined the Northwestern faculty in 1989. His research in artificial intelligence and computer science has encompassed natural language processing, case-based reasoning, machine learning, human-computer interaction, educational software, and computer vision. Birnbaum has authored or coauthored more than eighty articles. He was the program co-chair of the 1991 International Machine Learning Workshop and has been a member of the program committee for numerous other conferences and workshops.