Nikolas Iubel, Brown Institute Fellow for 2013-2014 and graduate of the Dual Degree program between Journalism and Computer Science at Columbia University, is currently an intern with The New York Times’ interactive news desk. Together with The Upshot’s Derek Willis, Nik created Bedfellows, a Python command-line tool intended to facilitate exploration of campaign finance data. Willis and Iubel have
CategoryIn the News
Synapp/Widescope receives Notable Paper Award at HCOMP 2014
David Lee, Ashish Goel, Tanja Aitamurto and Hélène Landemore’s paper, “Crowdsourcing for Participatory Democracies: Efficient Elicitation of Social Choice Functions,” received a Notable Paper Award at HCOMP 2014, the second Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligenceconference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing. The paper was one of the two runner-ups to the best paper award.
Art++ Magic Grant featured in the New York Times
Colleen Stockmann and Jean-Baptiste Boin are featured in a lovely piece in the New York Times on the digital revolution’s touch on museums. Colleen describes their Magic Grant project Art++ as giving “you more points of access into an artwork, so that it keeps you in the moment of looking, almost as if someone is guiding you through the
Stanford Magic Grant Team Earns City Recognition
The Magic Grant team Crowdsourced Democracy Team at Stanford was recognized on Oct. 15 by the City of Vallejo, Calif., for a digital voting system and their work on crowd sourced democracy. The team – which includes the Widescope and Synapp projects – and which is lead by Professor Ashish Goel, received an official proclamation
XRay featured in the NYT Bits Blog
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.
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