The New York Times Bits Blog featured a long piece by Steve Lohr on XRay, “a reverse-engineering machine that models the correlations made by web services.” As you browse the web, shop online or contact friends via SMS or email, companies collect and share information, making inferences about you to target their services. XRay exposes those inferences.
CategoryIn the News
CJR Article on ‘Bit by Bit’
From the Columbia Journalism Review (read the full article.) On Friday, Ellen Weinstein, an award-winning illustrator based in New York, found herself in unusual company. She was in one of the reading rooms at the New York Public Library, working with the members of NYPL Labs, who are trying to “re-imagine the library for the
Two Brown Fellows Defend Ph.D. Research
Congratulations to Brown Fellows David Chen and Sam Tsai who successfully defended their Ph.D. research in November. Both went to the studio afterwards for a clean recording of their presentations. You can see both Sam Tsai’s “Mobile Visual Search with Text and Image Features, and David Chen’s Memory Efficient Image Databases for Mobile Visual Search.
ACM’s Multimedia Grand Challenge
Congratulations to 2012-2013 Magic Grant team members Brendan Jou, Hongzhi Li, Joseph G. Ellis and faculty advisor Shih-Fu Chang for winning the Grand Challenge 1st Place Award at ACM Multimedia. Their paper, “Structured Exploration of Who, What, When, and Where in Heterogenous Multimedia News Sources,” can be seen here.
Year Zero
From the Nieman Journalism Lab Blog: “The journalism unicorn exists. I’ve seen one — even worked with one. Maybe you know the kind: a journalist who’s as nimble and dynamic as a reporter as she is with coding.” The Brown Institute is collaborating on a post-bacc program to help prepare journalists for the J-School’s Dual Degree
The Declassification Engine in Poynter
Poynter has just posted a fantastic writeup of one of this year’s Magic Grants, the Declassification Engine. Co-funded by the Tow Center for digital Journalism, the Declassification Engine will “create a critical mass of declassified documents by aggregating all the archives that are now just scattered online” and apply machine learning techniques to “reveal patterns in official
Brown Fellow Iubel joins ONA13 Student Newsroom
The Online News Association announced the members of its ONA13 Student Newsroom. Over 100 students applied from around the world, and Brown Fellow Nikolas Iubel was one of the 38 selected. The winners will provide intensive coverage of the Online News Association Conference & Awards Banquet, October 17-20 in Atlanta. This group will be mentored by distinguished
Coverage in the Niemanlab Blog!
The Niemanlab Blog has just posted a great article about the Institute — “Shaping technology to the story: The Brown Institute for Media Innovation is finding its niche”