Google Computational Journalism Research Awards launch in Europe

Posted by Andrea Held, Google University Relations & Matt Cooke, Google News Lab Europe

Journalism is evolving fast in the digital age, and researchers across Europe are working on exciting projects to create innovative new tools and open source software that will support online journalism and benefit readers. As part of the wider Google Digital News Initiative (DNI), we invited academic researchers across Europe to submit proposals for the Computational Journalism Research Awards.

After careful review by Google’s News Lab and Research teams, the following projects were selected:

SCAN: Systematic Content Analysis of User Comments for Journalists
Walid Maalej, Professor of Informatics, University of Hamburg
Wiebke Loosen, Senior Researcher for Journalism, Hans-Bredow-Institute, Hamburg, Germany
This project aims at developing a framework for the systematic, semi-automated analysis of audience feedback on journalistic content to better reflect the voice of users, mitigate the analysis efforts, and help journalists generate new content from the user comments.

Event Thread Extraction for Viewpoint Analysis
Ioana Manolescu, Senior Researcher, INRIA Saclay, France
Xavier Tannier, Professor of Computer Science, University Paris-Sud, France
The goal of the project is to automatically build topic "event threads" that will help journalists and citizens decode claims made by public figures, in order to distinguish between personal opinion, communication tools and voluntary distortions of the reality.

Computational Support for Creative Story Development by Journalists
Neil Maiden, Professor of Systems Engineering
George Brock, Professor of Journalism, City University London, UK
This project will develop a new software prototype to implement creative search strategies that journalists could use to strengthen investigative storytelling more efficiently than with current news content management and search tools.

We congratulate the recipients of these awards and we look forward to the results of their research. Each award includes funding of up to $60,000 in cash and $20,000 in computing credits on Google’s Cloud Platform. Stay tuned for updates on their progress.