The astounding growth in data gathering, processing, storage and networking capabilities over the past decade has opened the prospect of revolutionary advances in everything from medicine to media — if the data can actually be exploited properly. A key bottleneck is providing insight and understanding around what is important about the data, and what it means to people who need to make decisions and take action based on those data. As part of our Media Innovation Lunches at Stanford, Prof. Larry Birnbaum will outline his work in finding important and interesting patterns in data (especially social media) and in automatically generating stories based on those data to convey insights to people. Prof. Birnbaum will focus on applications to media and journalism and on the technology originally developed at Northwestern, that has led to the start-up Narrative Science.
Birnbaum is a professor of both Computer Science and Journalism at Northwestern, Head of its Computer Science Division and Co-Director of its Intelligent Information Laboratory. He is also Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Advisor of Narrative Science, Inc. Birnbaum’s research focuses on automatic content generation with an emphasis on applications to media and journalism. Together with students and colleagues, he has published more than 130 papers on these topics and holds 23 U. S. Patents. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Science from Yale Univerity.
The Media Innovation Lunch will take place on April 14 at noon in Packard 202 on the Stanford Campus.