The COVID-19 pandemic has upended American life and forced state and local governments to enact important policy decisions with incomplete or uncertain information. To help explain these decisions to the public, we’re launching an online repository of local, state and federal public records obtained through open-records requests called Documenting COVID-19 (documentingcovid19.io). We will provide these materials free-of-charge to
The Brown Institute is Proud to Announce Its 2020-2021 Magic Grants
The Brown Institute for Media Innovation, a collaboration between Stanford University’s School of Engineering and Columbia Journalism School, is pleased to announce its 2020-2021 Magic Grant recipients. Every year, the Brown Institute awards $1M in grants and fellowships to foster new tools and modes of expression. This is the eighth cohort of grantees — each
Contact Tracing: How decisions about COVID-19 were made by city and state governments
Updated 06/09/20: 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
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
Mapping Data Flows – Zoom Edition
Video conferencing app Zoom has surged in popularity due to the coronavirus pandemic, prompting the questions: what data can the company collect about our conversations, and what could they do with it? Those questions were answered by the researchers behind Mapping Data Flows — John Batelle, Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor at Columbia’s School
Who’s in Charge?
This post is part of a series of profiles of our current 2019-20 Magic Grants. It gives us an opportunity to brag about the great work being done by our grantees, and also to encourage you to consider applying for one of next year’s grants! Funding could start as early as July 1, depending on
Life on the Screen
This post is part of a series of profiles of our current 2019-20 Magic Grants. It gives us an opportunity to brag about the great work being done by our grantees, and also to encourage you to consider applying for one of next year’s grants! Funding could start as early as July 1, depending on
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