In an attempt to address key challenges of using artificial intelligence (AI) to understand, identify and mitigate newsroom biases and increase audience loyalty, Google on Monday announced a week-long JournalismAI Festival.
The festival is also a celebration of completing two-years partnership with London School of Economics and Political Science to launch JournalismAI, which is a global effort to promote media literacy in newsrooms through research, training and experimentation. Bringing together international academics, publishers and practitioners, this online event — JournalismAI Festival — will run from December 7th through December 11th featuring speakers and case studies from major global news organisations, including the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Schibsted and Nikkei.
Considering more than 62,000 journalists have taken Google’s online course — Introduction to Machine Learning; more than 4,000 people have downloaded the JournalismAI report; and over 20 media organisations have joined Collab, the launch of this festival cannot come at a better time, stated the official blog post. Google believes that this event will help in providing insights around the key challenges such as using AI to understand, identify and mitigate newsroom biases, and increase audience loyalty.
JournalismAI Festival will also witness a presentation of a new Google tool — Pinpoint, launched recently to bring in the power of Google Search to journalists. Along with that, in order to offer journalists a more hands-on approach to machine learning, the giant is also launching a new training course with Ukrainian data journalism agency Texty. According to Google, this “will help journalists learn how to train an algorithm to identify similar patterns in satellite imagery using Google Cloud AutoML Vision.”
The blog post further stated that, in 2018, Texty leveraged machine learning techniques in an investigation to detect cases of illegal amber mining across Ukraine; and with this training course, reporters will be able to build and work on similar types of models for their investigation. The dedicated GNI Live training sessions will be conducted in multiple countries, over the week in six languages.
