NewsQ Hackathon Results @ HackGT7. Congratulations to the Winners!
Building news ranking and recommendation systems can be tough. There’s a lot of opinion amid news articles out there. And maybe what seems important in one culture or language is not as important in another. So how should news algorithms work, especially amid the pitfalls of misinformation, disinformation and partisan bias? What is news, anyway?
Teams will prototype a news ranking and recommendation algorithm/service that surfaces articles from existing news and information online from a country of their choice. Information can come from existing news sites, social media platforms (Twitter, YouTube, Reddit… you name it!), or a combination of both.
Parameters, such as defining what qualifies as news, and more about the challenge and factors for evaluation can be found here.
Our judges and presenters are listed below.
When: October 16 to 18, 2020
Where: Online in collaboration with HackGT
Who: Students!
Questions? hello [at] newsq [dot] net
Our Judges and Presenters
Michael Best is associate professor with the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology where he directs the Technologies and International Development Lab. Dr. Best is Director of Research at Georgia Tech – Shenzhen, our campus in China. He was founding director of the United Nations University Institute on Computing and Society (UNU-CS) in Macau SAR, China. Professor Best is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the widely read journal Information Technologies and International Development. He holds a Ph.D. from MIT and has served as director of Media Lab Asia in India and head of the eDevelopment group at the MIT Media Lab.
Jennifer 8. Lee is co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Media, Entertainment and Culture, and co-founder and CEO of Plympton, a San Francisco-based literary studio that innovates in digital publishing. A former New York Times reporter, Jenny is a producer of “The Search for General Tso,” a documentary which premiered at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, and the author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. She is the founder of Emojicon and Misinfocon.
Humphrey Obuobi is a product manager at Recidiviz, and currently leads product strategy and execution for the Public Data team. Before Recidiviz, he was a product manager on Google’s ARCore APIs, building next-generation augmented reality experiences; before that, he spent time in various product and design roles at IDEO CoLab, Microsoft, and student-run design and development agency. Outside of work, he can usually be found exploring San Francisco on a skateboard, community organizing with DSA SF, or researching civic technology principles for a more equitable future. Humphrey holds a B.A. in Bioengineering with a minor in Computer Science from Harvard College.
Ellen Zegura is the Fleming Professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. She works in two primary areas, computer networking and computing for social good. In computer networking, she is known for her work on the GT-ITM suite of Internet topology tools, which remain in use 20 years after release. In mobile wireless networking, she and colleagues invented the concept of message ferries to facilitate communications in environments where network connectivity is unreliable and/or sparse. Her work in computing and social good includes work in Liberia, with Native Americans in Southern California, and with residents of the Westside of Atlanta. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, and an elected member of the Computing Research Association Board (CRA). Since Fall 2014 she has been on the Executive Board of the CRA.
Connie Moon Sehat is NewsQ Initiative Director. Her current roles allow her to address the challenges of perspectives and misinformation around news quality. Overall, Connie’s work has focused on the intersections of computing and democratic life, whether dissertating in German history, developing International Space Station software, or working on projects like the bibliographic Zotero (zotero.org), the New Orleans Research Collaborative (nolaresearch.org), ELMO (election, human rights, and health monitoring at getelmo.org), NewsFrames at Global Voices (newsframes.globalvoices.org) and most recently, Research Community Lead at Credibility Coalition.
Brought to you by the Georgia Tech Center for Computing and Societies and the NewsQ Initiative.