New Book on War by JMSC Associate Professor Kevin Sites Released Today
28 January 2013
Video: Public Talk – Computer Science and Journalism
8 February 2013

Feb 4: Talk – Computer Science and Journalism

Jonathan Stray

Jonathan Stray

Jonathan Stray

The Journalism and Media Studies Centre invites you to a public talk:

Computer Science and Journalism: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together” by Jonathan Stray.

Computer science and journalism are intersecting in surprising ways. Data mining techniques can find stories buried in large volumes of data, while visualization helps explain them to readers. Natural language processing can be used to uncover trends and topics in unstructured text from social media or other documents, or build a personalized stream of news around each user’s interests. Social network analysis has the potential to help investigative journalists trace complex webs of people and organizations, as well as target stories to precisely the people who might need them. Cryptography is necessary to secure online communication, and to verify the authenticity of source material.

Computational journalism combines classic journalistic values of storytelling and public accountability with techniques from computer science, statistics, the social sciences, and the digital humanities.

This talk will be a lightning overview of the state of the art in this rapidly developing field, including work being done here at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre.

About the speaker:

Jonathan Stray is a computer scientist and a journalist and currently leads the Overview Project at the Associated Press in New York, an open-source system to help journalists sort through huge quantities of unstructured documents. He has contributed articles to Wired, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and China Daily, and teaches computational journalism at Columbia University. He is an alumnus of the Master of Journalism programme at HKU.

Details of the event are below.

Talk: Computer science and journalism: two great tastes that taste great together

Date: Monday, February 4, 2013
Time: 12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Venue: Digital Media Lab, G/F, Eliot Hall, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, HKU
Speaker: Jonathan Stray: Associated Press, Columbia University

Admission is free