Our 2020-21 Magic Grant Wolf Pack has published its first piece — a deep dive into the invention of the term “superpredator”. The team “found nearly 300 uses of ‘superpredator’ in 40 leading newspapers and magazines from 1995 to 2000. Fewer than 40% of these articles criticized the term.” As Carroll Bogert and LynNell Hankock
CategoryIn the News
Magic Grant projects ‘Public Analysis of TV News’ and ‘Sports Illustrated’ featured on Bloomberg QuickTake
On October 21, 2020, Ashlee Vance, Senior Writer at Bloomberg Businessweek interviewed Stanford Professor Kayvon Fatahalian and highlighted advancements in artificial intelligence through Magic Grant projects Public Analysis of TV News and Sports Illustrated. In the piece, Vance and Fatahalian highlight the tremendous opportunities that AI has provided for media makers. Both also offer thoughtfulness
Institute Director Agrawala talks Deep Fakes with the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI
To spot a deep fake, researchers looked for inconsistencies between “visemes,” or mouth formations, and “phonemes,” the phonetic sounds. Using AI to Detect Seemingly Perfect Deep-Fake Videos was published on the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Blog on 10/13/2020, which featured Brown Institute Director Maneesh Agrawala. In the article, Agrawala spoke to the struggles
Contact Tracing: How decisions about COVID-19 were made by city and state governments
Updated 08/11/21: The team behind the 2019-20 Magic Grant Trump Town have made a pivot, and are focusing on state and local governments and their responses to COVID-19. Derek Kravitz and his team have received thousands of pages of emails in response to a large number of very targeted FOIA requests. In these emails we
Datashare wins best open source project at #OSSPARIS19
The Brown Institute is pleased to announce that Datashare, a Magic Grant project by ICIJ, has been announced as the winner of the best open source project at the Paris Open Source Summit taking place December 10-11, 2019. DataShare allows for valuable knowledge about people and companies to be “sieved” into indexes and shared securely
“Follower Factory” by NYT & CJS Comp Journalism Class is Finalist for Pulitzer Prize
On Monday, a package of stories including The Follower Factory — an in-depth investigation of purchased followers on twitter — along with other reporting on how Facebook and the big tech firms allowed the spread of misinformation and failed to protect consumer privacy, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. The Follower
Brown Featured in Columbia News
Mark Hansen, Director of the Brown Institute at Columbia, has been featured on Columbia News in a piece discussing the institute’s open Magic Grant Call for Proposals. He also describes the mission of Brown and its role in the Journalism School and Columbia University broadly. Read the piece on Columbia’s main site (brwn.co/5q). The 2019-20 Magic Grant
‘RoughCut’ Magic Grant Featured in Wired
RoughCut, a 2016-17 Magic Grant led by MacKenzie Leake, has been featured in Wired, as an editing tool that will “turn us all into filmmakers”. Now years in development, RoughCut seeks to develop a system to support the process of making a rough cut, a primary task in editing a video. Video production is a
Queer & “Here”
February 27, 5:00-6:30pm, The Brown Institute, RSVP at brwn.co/qh From hookup apps to investigative reporting, community-building to historical archiving, the Internet has transformed queer experience and visibility. What have these changes wrought? What gains? What losses? In a free-wheeling and frank conversation, Zach Stafford, editor-in-chief of the U.S.’s oldest LGBTQ news magazine, The Advocate, and