Check out the list of final projects for this term’s (Spring 2010) class on Computational Journalism.  Final reports expected in last week of April.  Stay tuned.

Computation + Journalism (CS 4464 / CS 6465)

This class is aimed at understanding the computational and technological advancements in the area of journalism. Primary focus is on the study of technologies for developing new tools for (a) sense-making from diverse news information sources, (b) the impact of more and cheaper networked sensors (c) collaborative human models for information aggregation and sense-making, (d) mashups and the use of programming in journalism, (e) the impact of mobile computing and data gathering, (f) computational approaches to information quality, (g) data mining for personalization and aggregation, and (h) citizen journalism.

Computing, Society and Professionalism (CS 4001)

Although Computing, Society and Professionalism is a required course for CS majors, it is not a typical computer science course. Rather than dealing with the technical content of computing, it addresses the effects of computing on individuals, organizations, and society, and on what yourresponsibilities are as a computing professional in light of those impacts. The topic is a very broad one and one that you will have to deal with almost every day of your professional life. The issues are sometimes as intellectually deep as some of the greatest philosophical writings in history – and sometimes as shallow as a report on the evening TV news. This course can do little more than introduce you to the topics, but, if successful, will change the way you view the technology with which you work.

Abstract

We introduce methods for augmenting aerial visualizations of Earth (from tools such as Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth) with dynamic information obtained from videos. Our goal is to make Augmented Earth Maps that visualize the live broadcast of dynamic sceneries within a city. We propose different approaches to analyze videos of pedestrians and cars, under differing conditions and then augment Aerial Earth Maps (AEMs) with live and dynamic information. We also analyze natural phenomenon (clouds) and project information from these to the AEMs to add the visual reality.

EXCERPT

“At the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, a three-year-old program in “computational journalism” helps computer-science majors study how journalists gather, organize and utilize information, then take these workflows and see how technology can make the processes easier.”

Full article here. Also see CnJ site.

Irfan Essa
Georgia Institute of Technology
School of Interactive Computing, GVU and RIM Centers
April 21, 2009.

(see the video of this presentation)

Abstract

Our consumption of images (photography/video) continues to grow with the pervasiveness of computing (networking, mobile and media) technologies into our daily lives. Everyone now has a mobile camera, and digital image capture, processing, and sharing has become ubiquitous in our society. This has led to a significant impact on we want to (a) create novel scenes, (b) share our experiences with images, and (c) interact with  large amounts of images and videos from many sources. In this talk, I will start  with a brief overview of series of ongoing efforts in the analysis of images and videos for rendering novel scenes, interacting with images/videos and collaboratively authoring new content. I will describe some work on video-based rendering and synthesizing novel videos (and scenes) and highlight the technical contributions being made in areas of Computational Photography and Video.

Using these sets of efforts as a foundation I will showcase where things are headed in terms of user generated content, media sharing, annotation, and reuse with large scale networks. In essence, everybody is a content, producer, distributor, and consumer. I will describe some new efforts that move towards understanding mobile imaging and video, and also discuss issues of collaborative imaging, collective authoring, ad-hoc sensor networks, and peer production with images and videos.  Using these concepts I will discuss how all of these issues are impacting the field Journalism and Reporting and how we have started on a new interdisciplinary research and education effort, we call Computational Journalism.  The concept of Computational Journalism includes more than just imaging, and relates to media and information in general and is aimed at the study of how we remain informed in this connected world. I will outline this new field and relate it back to imaging, with examples from some of our recent work in this new area.

Abstract

Computation & Journalism: The Impact of Technology on Journalism, Information Quality, and Civic Literacy

Irfan Essa
Georgia Institute of Technology
School of Interactive Computing, GVU and RIM Centers 

Fundamentally, journalism is the process of collecting news information and disseminating that information with a layer of contextualization and understanding provided by journalists in the form of a news story. Recent advances in computational technology are rapidly affecting how news is gathered, reported, and distributed, and how stories are authored and told. New technologies for aggregating, visualizing, summarizing, consuming, and collaborating on news are becoming increasingly popular. Theses advances are challenging the traditional practices of journalism and directly affecting the future of news production and consumption. Both computation and journalism share a deep interest in information and the value it provides to society, and they are deeply involved in the future of storytelling in various contexts, especially current events. This requires us to consider how both Computation and Journalism can help each other. 

In this talk, I will present a vision for a new area of research and education that brings together the fields of computation and journalism together to enhance both these disciplines and supports a creation of a “Computationalist-Journalist.,” a new kind of participant in the public conversation. I will start by describing how imaging, video, and media production and consumption has changed with technology and then how similar technologies can be used for Journalism and related Civic Literacy issues. I will describe new technologies that have changed the landscape of both Computation and Journalism and use these developments to showcase, where we are headed to with both Computation and Journalism, and technologists and journalists together to create new computing tools that further the aims of journalism. 

Bio

by JOHN MECKLIN

Dec 23, 2008 in Miller-McCune

“If you pay passing attention to the media landscape, you know that most mainstream news outlets have had their business models undermined by the digital revolution. As their general-interest monopolies have been pillaged by niche online competitors, traditional news organizations have lost revenue and cachet, laying off journalists in waves that have grown into tsunamis. This process has created dire prospects for the future of investigative reporting, often seen as the most costly of journalistic forms.”

Goes on to mention Computational Journalism and our (at GA Tech) and recent Duke University’s efforts in this space and few others.

ABSTRACT

We have developed an audio-based casual puzzle game which produces a time-stamped transcription of spokenaudio as a by-product of play. Our evaluation of the game indicates that it is both fun and challenging. The transcripts generated using the game are more accurate than those produced using a standard automatic transcription system and the time-stamps of words are within several hundred milliseconds of ground truth.

Videolyzer is a tool designed to help journalists and bloggers collect, organize, and present information about the quality (i.e. validity, reliability, etc.) of online videos. It makes it possible to evaluate and make sense of things like comments, claims, and sources as they relate to the video. Users can comment and annotate pieces of the video (called “anchors”) to provide a more fine-grained description of the information in the video. The interface also incorporates a tightly integrated transcript of what’s spoken in the video to make it easier to navigate the dense information there. Finally, Videolyzer allows for collaboration among many people. Users can build off of each other’s annotations and rate each other in a form of distributed vetting and peer-evaluation.

ABSTRACT

Using off-the-shelf Global Positioning System (GPS) units, we reconstruct buildings in 3D by exploiting the reduction in signal to noise ratio (SNR) that occurs when the buildings obstruct the line-of-sight between the moving units and the orbiting satellites. We measure the size and height of skyscrapers as well as automatically constructing a density map representing the location of multiple buildings in an urban landscape.  If deployed on a large scale, via a cellular service provider’s GPS-enabled mobile phones or GPS-tracked delivery vehicles, the system could provide an inexpensive means of continuously creating and updating 3D maps of urban environments.

ABSTRACT

Making sense of the information quality of online media including things such as the accuracy and validity of claims and the reliability of sources is essential for people to be well-informed. We are developing Videolyzer to address the challenge of information quality sense-making by allowing motivated individuals to analyze, collect, share, and respond to criticisms of the information quality of online political videos and their transcripts. In this paper specifically we present a model of how the annotation ontology and collaborative dynamics embedded in Videolyzer can enhance information quality.

 
Abstract

Digital image capture, processing, and sharing has become pervasive in our society. This has had significant impact on how we create novel scenes, how we share our experiences, and how we interact with images and videos. In this talk, I will present an overview of series of ongoing efforts in the analysis of images and videos for rendering novel scenes. First I will discuss (in brief) our work on Video Textures, where repeating information is extracted to generate extended sequences of videos. I will also describe some our extensions to this approach that allows for controlled generation of animations of video sprites. We have developed various learning and optimization techniques that allow for video-based animations of photo-realistic characters. Using these sets of approaches as a foundation, then I will show how new images and videos can be generated. I will show examples of Photorealistic and Non-photorealistic Renderings of Scenes (Videos and Images) and how these methods support the media reuse culture, so common these days with user generated content.   I will then describe some of our new efforts that move towards understanding mobile imaging and video, and also discuss issues of collaborative imaging and authoring and ad-hoc sensor networks, and peer production with images and videos, leading to a new concepts of how computation has impacted journalism. Time permitting, I will also share some of our efforts on video annotation and how we have taken some of these new concepts of video analysis to classrooms.

Investigator(s): Umakishore Ramachandran, (Principal Investigator), Irfan Essa (Co-Principal Investigator)

Dates: September 1, 2008 – August 31, 2009 (Estimated)

Abstract

From the western world to the third world, the use of handheld devices (cellphones, PDAs) has proliferated. The world of users is becoming both wireless and mobile. Web 2.0 has ushered in an age wherein the web is viewed as a provider of services and not just a repository of documents and/or information. Despite this advance, the web remains just that, a single web with an inherent assumption that a powerful computing and communication infrastructure supports it. Couldn’t mobile wireless devices in close proximity form a web of their own? This is the vision behind this project, the Web on Demand (WoD). WoD aims at bridging the gap between social networks and ad hoc networking. In other words, it aims to rethink the system software stack all the way from application to networking that would allow the creation and management of social networks without any assumption of infrastructure support. The core of the research is to develop software technologies for mobile devices that would allow the dynamic creation of thematic ad hoc overlay networks empowering (a) mobile people with similar interests (e.g., weather forecast), (b) friends and family (e.g., in a theme park), and (c) participants in mission critical applications (e.g., search and rescue), stay connected. WoD complements the World Wide Web (WWW) and leverages it when it is available, such as exploiting the ambient computing infrastructure to enhance user experience, and managing the dynamic creation of User Generated Content (UGC) by mobile users. The vision behind this project is to democratize access to services that are currently offered through WWW. In this sense, the results from this research can have far-reaching technological and societal consequences. Most importantly, the research will help breed a new class of computer scientists who are connected with societal causes in addition to advancing technology.

• Date and Time: Wednesday, 13 August 2008 | 1:45 pm – 5:30 pm
• Location: Room 502 A, Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Fundamentally, journalism is the process of collecting news information and disseminating that information with a layer of contextualization and understanding provided by journalists in the form of a news story. Recent advances in computational technology are rapidly affecting how news is gathered, reported, and distributed, and how stories are authored and told. New technologies for aggregating, visualizing, summarizing, consuming, and collaborating on news are becoming increasingly popular. They are challenging the traditional practices of journalism and directly affecting the future of news production and consumption. Computation and journalism share a deep interest in information and the value it provides to society, and they are deeply involved in the future of storytelling in various contexts, especially current events. This class summarizes how these new technologies affect journalism, both at the core of the journalism discipline and in its practice and business. Topics include: the technologies that have empowered citizen journalism and related citizen media production and authoring; mobile and sensing technologies that allow journalism to become ubiquitous and pervasive; the changes in photo, video, and broadcast journalism; and how web, online, and science journalism are changing the basic processes of reporting. Instructors focus especially on areas of special interest to the SIGGRAPH community: photography and video, large-scale information visualization, and social networking.

Presentations will be made by:

• Irfan Essa (Georgia Institute of Technology) [website]
• Brad Stenger (WIRED NextFest)
• Maneesh Agrawala (University of California, Berkeley) [website]
• Jeffrey Heer (University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University) [website]
• Eric Ulken (LA Times) [website]
• Chloe Sladden (Current TV) [website]

This course is open to all registrant of ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 and has not pre-requisite requirements. See the info on ACM SIGGRAPH Site

By Nick Diakopoulos (My PhD Student)

Audio Puzzler is a new kind of puzzle game based on unauthored content found online. The audio for the puzzles is taken from popular or interesting video clips from different genres such as news, documentary, or television. The audio puzzler is the type of game that harnesses people’s play to also provide valuable data which enriches the content played with. This is in the same vein as the ESPGame, the Listen Game, and PhotoPlay, which are all games which gather data in the process of game play. But while the data collected by these other games is useful for machine learning, the data collected with audio puzzler is immediately valuable as a transcription of the speech in the video. A similar effort (but in a much grander domain) is the Fold It project which seeks to harness playtime to solve protein folding problems. Much more detailed information about the evaluation of the technology will be forthcoming in a paper to be published at ACM Multimedia in October.

An analysis of the changing world of Journalism.  Worth a read. States how the newsroom and the print media are especially impacted.

ABSTRACT

Fundamentally, journalism is aimed at collecting news information and disseminating that information with a layer of contextualization and understanding provided by journalists. Recent advances in computational technology are rapidly affecting how news information is gathered, reported and distributed. Furthermore, new avenues for aggregating, visualizing, summarizing, consuming, and collaborating on news are increasingly becoming popular and challenging traditional practices of Journalism. Following the success of text search, image and video search questions are now poised to make a bigger impact to journalism and other related fields. Computation and Journalism individually share a deep routed interest in Information, and the value it provides to society. The concept of Information Quality, the measure of the value that the information provides to the user of that information, brings these two disciplines together. In computing and information sciences, information quality is used to describe the degree of excellence in communicating knowledge or intelligence and is composed of different facets such as accuracy, reliability, comprehensiveness, currency, and validity. In journalism, where the conveyance of quality information is paramount, principles such as accuracy, fairness, thoroughness, and transparency guide journalists in communicating quality information. Traditionally, journalism has also entailed an ethos of working on the side of the citizenry to provide them with quality information they need to make informed decisions in the process of their daily lives. However, the plethora of un-vetted blogs, podcasts, videos and other online media, generated by users or by corporations with subjective biases have led to significant compromise in information quality. Collaborative knowledge generation (wikipedia), and citizen journalism, are showing new ways of how information and (global) news can be shared. However, as the Web and the Internet continue to grow and as computing technologies pervade through the planet, a thorough study of the process of journalism and the deep computational aspects of such processes need to be undertaken. To this end, the PI’s research group at Georgia Institute of Technology is interested in understanding how computational advances impact the field of journalism. The long term aim is to make novel contributions by developing computational technologies to better support the goals of journalism. To launch this effort, they are organizing a Symposium on Computation + Journalism at GA Tech, in Atlanta, GA, February 22-23, 2008. The goal of this symposium is to bring together stakeholder from the all aspects of Journalism, Media, and Computation. Participants in panels, presentations and breakout groups will discuss these issues and create a roadmap towards answering these questions that bring together computation and journalism.

My students decided to play a very nice joke on me. This morning I walked in to find my office open (and it was not!)

check out the left image, with door closed and the right image with the door open.

And, then the inside of the office was kinda different too.