2012-02-15 Transforming Data into Stories and Insight: Scaling Human Editorial Judgment

A joint Chicago Chapter ACM / Loyola University Computer Science Department meeting

Loyola University Water Tower Campus (Chicago/Michigan Area)

111 E. Pearson Street, Chicago IL 60611

Beane Ballroom (13th Floor, Lewis Towers) Campus map

Admission: Free, General Admission

As the publishing industry struggles to deal with a post-Google world and more and more data comes online, there is a growing opportunity for the automatic creation of content based upon the analysis of data and the articulation of the stories hidden within it. In this session, Larry Birnbaum will present the Narrative Science platform and discuss how it enables this work. He will also step through the possibilities that it opens up for both publishers and organizations that are generating data related to their internal business processes.

Dr. Larry Birnbaum is one of the founders and Chief Scientific Advisor of Narrative Science, a Chicago-based company focused on the automatic generation of stories from data. Larry is also on the faculty in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University, where he is a researcher in the areas of human-computer interaction, intelligent and context-based information systems, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence. Larry received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Yale University, and served on the faculty there for three years before moving to Northwestern in 1989, where he served as Chair of Computer Science from 1998 to 2002. Larry is co-Director of Northwestern's Intelligent Information Laboratory and serves on the Management Committee of the University's recently formed Knight News Innovation Laboratory, a joint initiative of the Medill School of Journalism and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern aimed at the development and deployment of innovative technologies for media and journalism. In 2010 he helped found Narrative Science where he currently helps guide the development of the company's technology into products that are transforming the way in which data are understood and conveyed.

While there will be light refreshments available, feel free to "brown bag" it and bring in food from the outside to eat during the social hour.