On August 14, 2020, the tech outlet Engadget featured recent research produced by the Magic Grant ‘Synthesizing Novel Video from GANs’ developed by grantee Haotian Zhang, alongside Cristobal Sciutto under faculty direction from Maneesh Agrawala and Kayvon Fatahalian.’ The article titled “These AI-generated tennis matches are both eerie and impressive,” describes the system developed under
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Fast and Three-rious: Speeding Up Weak Supervision with Triplet Methods
Authors Daniel Y. Fu, Mayee F. Chen, Frederic Sala, Sarah M. Hooper, Kayvon Fatahalian, Christopher Ré Abstract Weak supervision is a popular method for building machine learning models without relying on ground truth annotations. Instead, it generates probabilistic training labels by estimating the accuracies of multiple noisy labeling sources (e.g., heuristics, crowd workers). Existing approaches
Columbia Local News Initiative Is Hiring For Three New Roles!
By Al Johri. Journalists around the country are doing ever more important work under ever tighter budgets and more uncertain conditions. As we collectively navigate COVID-19, the work that local news organizations do could not be more vital to the communities they serve. Local newsrooms need every advantage they can get to focus on the
Magic Grantee Derek Kravitz on the reporting behind The Times’ “Why New Orleans Pushed Ahead With Mardi Gras”
By Alex Calderwood Brown Institute fellow Derek Kravitz and New York Times correspondent Richard Fausset published a story yesterday that detailed why New Orleans officials went ahead with Mardi Gras, despite the growing worries at the time regarding COVID-19. The story, published in The Times as “Why New Orleans Pushed Ahead With Mardi Gras, Even
Announcing Weekly Magic Grant Information Sessions
The Brown Institute is hosting virtual Magic Grant Information Sessions taking place each Thursday on Zoom at 4:30PM EST. If you’re interested in learning more about our Magic Grant offerings, come to our upcoming information session where you can find out: The types of projects we’re interested in supporting The various types of support we
Updates Regarding the Timing of 2020 Grant and Fellowship Applications in Response to COVID-19
In response to disruptions from COVID19, we have moved our Magic Grant and Climate + Resilience deadlines to May 15, 2020 — we thought you could use a little more time in preparing your applications. This will not, however, change when funds are available to you. If you have any questions, reach out the browninstitute@columbia.edu
Vox’s ‘Today, Explained’ host Sean Rameswaram Visits Stanford
In a packed Cypress Auditorium on Tuesday, February 18, Vox’s ‘Today, Explained’ host Sean Rameswaram sat down with Maneesh Agrawala, Director of the Brown Institute, to discuss his daily podcast and how Vox focuses on connecting with audiences in new, uplifting ways. In their conversation, Rameswaram also discussed the daily podcast ecosystem and the state
Selfie or Bust: An Introduction to Immersive Storytelling Technology
By Alex Calderwood. Over the weekend, The Brown Institute’s Creative Technologist Ziv Schneider hosted a two-day Immersive Storytelling workshop, introducing a room full of journalists and new media artists to photogrammetry and virtual reality. Ziv began the day on Saturday exhibiting technologies that are used to digitally render the physical world in 3D, from infrared
Coming Together: Insights on Prototyping from our Winter All-Hands
One of the brilliant aspects of the Brown Institute’s design is our quarterly “all hands” meetings. Every few months, the Magic Grantees, fellows and staff from the Stanford and Columbia sides of the institute come together to share the progress they’ve made on their projects. The venue alternates — California, New York, California, New York…