BU joins elite group powering media innovation

Bennett University joined an elite group of research institutions powering media innovation globally when the Times School of Media and the Computer Science Engineering Department of the university were chosen as the Asia-Pacific lead partners of the prestigious Collab Challenge organized by the JournalismAI team of POLIS, the journalism think tank of London School of Economics and Political Science.

Earlier, LSE had announced the names of Knight Lab at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, as the lead partners for the Americas and BBC News Labs and Clwstwr as the lead partners for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

This is the second year of the JournalismAI Challenge which has been launched by POLIS with the support of Google News Initiative. Its goal is to explore innovative solutions to improve journalism via the use of artificial intelligence technologies.

Rahul Dass of the Times School of Media and Tapas Badal of the Computer Science Department of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Bennett University will be coordinating the APAC Challenge on behalf of the institution.

Research Questions

The Research Question that Bennett University has framed for the APAC region is “How might we use AI and audience insights to help newsrooms design more relevant and interactive news narratives?”

Building on previous work developed by the Times School of Media in collaboration with the Computer Science Engineering Department at Bennett University, the team will devise innovative storytelling methods to reach hitherto unreached audiences by extracting insights from datasets and social networks.

The research question framed by Knight Lab, Medill School of Journalism, is “How might we use AI technologies to innovate newsgathering and investigative reporting techniques?” Building on the experiences of Knight Lab, the team will explore opportunities for using methods such as entity extraction, knowledge management, computer vision and image analysis to help journalists work through data and derive insights for deep, rich storytelling. This team will focus on democratising these techniques for newsrooms and journalists of varying technical aptitude.

The research question framed by BBC Labs and Clwstwr is “How might we use modular journalism and artificial intelligence to assemble new storytelling formats?” The team will explore opportunities to tell journalistic stories in different ways to different people in different contexts. The focus will be on developing new storytelling formats.

Media organisations in the Asia Pacific interested in participating in the challenge should send a mail to Lakshmi at lakshmi@journalismai.info with the subject line “APAC Collab Challenge”. Applications close on April 30 at 11:59pm GMT.