SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Northwestern Prof. Larry Birnbaum, who will present a talk titled “From Contextual Search to Automatic Content Generation: Scaling Human Editorial Judgment” on Monday May 21st from 11:00am-12:00pm in Frances Searle Building, Room 1.421 on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend.
About the talk
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.
About Larry Birnbaum
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.
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From Contextual Search to Automatic Content Generation: Scaling Human Editorial Judgement
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SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Duke University PhD candidate Catherine Shea. She will present her findings in a talk titled “Motivation as an Antecedent to Social Network Structure”. The talk will be on May 7th from 11:00am-12:30pm in Frances Searle Building, Room 1.421 on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend.
On Friday, December 2, from 2:15-3:30 p.m. Dr. Griffin M Weber will be giving a presentation in room 1-421 of Frances Searle Building on the Northwestern University Evanston Campus. The talk is entitled “Social Network Analysis Using Harvard Catalyst Profiles”. Harvard Catalyst Profiles is an open source, ontology based, research networking software platform that creates research profiles for an institution’s faculty, and links these together through both Passive Networks, which are automatically generated based on information known about investigators, and Active Networks, which users themselves create by indicating their relationships to other researchers. These networks have numerous applications, ranging from finding individual collaborators and mentors to understanding the dynamics of an entire research community. Harvard Catalyst Profiles is used by institutions around the world and has an active user community with multiple software development teams contributing to the platform.
On Friday, October 21, from 2:00-3:00 p.m. University of Oxford Research Fellow, Bernie Hogan will be giving a presentation in Room 1-483 of Frances Searle Building on the Northwestern University Evanston Campus. This presentation will provide an overview of several studies that explore the phenomena related to how social networks mirror offline networks, albeit not perfectly.