AuthorMark Hansen

By Alex Calderwood. Justin Hicks’ deep voice rolls through the microphone, sending blue light across the dark chamber like a waveform, illuminating on the table in front of me a half eaten piece of corn-on-the-cob and the faces of people who until a few minutes ago were strangers. The light reverbs-out with his voice, hinting

“The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.”  Hamming, 1962. Fernando Perez, one of the creators of the Jupyter Notebook, began his talk at the Brown Institute Thursday with this quote from Richard Hamming’s book on algorithms. Fernando, or at least Jupyter, will be familiar to students in the Journalism School who have taken any

Thursday, May 9, Fernando Perez, a co-founder of Project Jupyter, will be the last speaker in our Distinguished Lecture Series in Computational Innovation. His team is responsible for the Jupyter notebook that we use throughout the Journalism School — from the Lede, to the Data MS, to the Dual Degree.  It even finds its way

By Alex Calderwood. In 2008, Noya Kohavi found herself employed as a reporter for the Israeli fashion magazine Signon. She got the job “by accident,” after signing on to write profiles for them. “It was really fun, but I didn’t know anything about fashion,” she says. When Kohavi was assigned a story — Spring trends

By Alex Calderwood. From algorithms that design flight paths for drones to record videos of a scene, to a 360° camera technology that helps a photographer find the best placement for their camera and lights, Brown has long supported work that makes complex storytelling tools easier to use. Among the 2018-19 Magic Grants are a

By Alex Calderwood. Sarah Stillman, director of the Global Migration Project at Columbia Journalism School, and staff writer at The New Yorker, says the project When Deportation is a Death Sentence, a 2018-19 Magic Grant, originally grew out of curiosity about the fallout from Obama-era deportations; as the number of Central American asylum-seekers at the

By Alex Calderwood. DNA evidence carries an aura of the indisputable, thought of as the “gold standard” in forensic science. Because of this power, law enforcement has asked forensic laboratories to interpret ever more challenging evidence — “touch” DNA evidence like a gun or cell phone which are often handled by a number of people. 

Last week was the six-month mark since the most recent batch of Magic Grants were awarded to the 2018-2019 cohort of journalists, technology researchers, and media experts. On Friday the 8th, the group met for their second “All-Hands” meeting of the year. It’s a fun and interesting event for our Magic Grantees. As its name