Google's JournalismAI festival
Google on Monday announced a week-long JournalismAI Festival to help address key challenges such as using artificial intelligence (AI) to understand, identify and mitigate newsroom biases and increase audience loyalty.
In collaboration with the London School of Economics, the online event will run from December 7 through December 11 and will feature speakers and case studies from major global news organizations.
Google said that to offer journalists a more hands-on approach to machine learning, JournalismAI is simultaneously launching a new training course with Ukrainian data journalism agency Texty.
"This resource, available on the Google News Initiative (GNI) Training Center in 16 languages, will help journalists learn how to train an algorithm to identify similar patterns in satellite imagery using Google Cloud AutoML Vision," the company said in a statement.
In 2018, Texty published Leprosy of the Land, an investigation in which they used machine learning techniques to detect cases of illegal amber mining across Ukraine. In the training course, Google will be helping reporters build a similar model that Texty used for their investigation.
The dedicated GNI Live training sessions will take place over the week in multiple countries and in six languages. Two years ago, the Google News Initiative partnered with the London School of Economics and Political Science to launch JournalismAI.
Since then, more than 62,000 journalists have taken Introduction to Machine Learning, an online course provided in 17 languages in partnership with Belgian broadcaster VRT.
More than 4,000 people have downloaded the JournalismAI report, which argued that "robots are not going to take over journalism" and that media organizations are keen to collaborate with one another and with technology companies.
