NYC Media Lab December Newsletter: Applications to attend NewsLab ’20 close this Thursday, December 5
NYC Media Lab December Newsletter: Applications to attend NewsLab ’20 close this Thursday, December 5
NewsLab ’20, a workshop-driven event supported by Knight Foundation, will bring 150 newsroom leaders from across America to Downtown Brooklyn. Apply to attend by December 5, 2019 at midnight.
NYC Media Lab is looking forward to hosting NewsLab ’20 on January 24–25, 2020. At the event, a selected group of 150 editors and newsroom executives from across the country will engage in hands-on working groups, strategy sessions, and discussions centered on AI applications for news ecosystems. A few topics to be explored include:
- Emerging business models and economics.
- Automation of content and newsroom workflows with AI.
- Startup innovation and new platforms in the market.
The goal of NewsLab ’20 is to define challenges faced by local newsrooms, and investigate how emerging technologies can enable new commercial and journalistic partnerships. These partnerships may help to maximize the potential of local news organizations as they take advantage of emerging artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data technologies.
The application to attend is open until this Thursday, December 5, 2019 at midnight. We encourage you to apply, and please share this opportunity with your colleagues who are working within local news and media ecosystems.
Apply to Attend: NewsLab ‘20
Last Chance to Apply! NYC Media Lab’s open calls with The New York Times and Havas close tomorrow, Tuesday, December 3 at midnight.
Faculty and students: be sure to apply for these programs to work on exciting prototyping projects during the Spring semester. If you would like to be notified when new open calls are announced, just share your mobile phone number here, and we’ll text you when new opportunities are posted.
The New York Times: Spatial Computing for News Challenge
New York Times is now recruiting university teams to explore the opportunities that spatial computing will create for the future of journalism. From augmented reality to data visualization, photogrammetry, and volumetric capture, spatial computing can support creation tools and workflows for news and content production. If you are developing spatial computing technologies on campus, this is your opportunity to work with The New York Times on an exciting prototyping sprint in Spring 2020.
Award amount: $5,000 per university team
Application Deadline: Tuesday, December 3 (Midnight)
APPLY HERE
Havas Lean Venture Studio for Retail
Havas is seeking teams to reimagine and build the future of retail. In this prototyping sprint, you’ll build innovative solutions with emerging technologies that will shape new and unique customer experiences, while learning lean processes such as customer discovery and market validation. Havas will provide expert mentorship along the way, and work with you to expose new solutions to select Havas clients in the retail space. Teams will work within several identified trend areas, such as: creating experiences; retail as a place to connect; desire for connoisseurs; and convergence of physical and digital.
Award amount: $5,000 per startup and university team
Application Deadline: Tuesday, December 3 (Midnight)
APPLY HERE
New & Noteworthy
Follow us. NYC Media Lab recently expanded its social media presence, with new pages on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you want to get a glimpse of NYC Media Lab as it moves through the City’s university, startup, and media company ecosystems, be sure to follow us for daily updates.
In the news. Movers and Shakers NYC made headlines for bringing stories of iconic black women to the forefront with augmented reality. Built in the Verizon 5G EdTech Challenge program, their prototype “Unsung” helps to educate middle school students about black musicians, and spans four decades to include Beyoncé, Odetta Holmes, Ella Sheppard and Nina Simone. Their project will be ready to launch in classrooms by September 2020.
The future is female. As part of our weekly Innovation Monitor newsletter, NYC Media Lab took a deep-dive into the femtech space, looking at the startups and technologies that are radicalizing women’s health. This growing market includes companies that are working to address period management, reproductive health and empowerment, family planning, pregnancy care and more. As women increasingly become investors, founders and healthcare leaders, we look forward to more innovations made for and by women.
Kickoff! NYC Media Lab recently began the Verizon 5G Retail Prototyping Challenge. For the next several weeks, five startups and talented university fellows will work with local retailers to innovate in the customer experience space. Teams will work with leadership from Verizon 5G Labs to prototype solutions and expand their market reach. The program aims to support small businesses as they learn what’s possible with high-bandwidth, low latency technologies.
R&D
Augmented Reality. In the real world, we are surrounded by potentially important data. For example, military personnel and first responders may need to understand the layout of an environment, including the locations of designated assets, specified in latitude and longitude. However, many AR systems cannot associate absolute geographic coordinates with the coordinate system in which they track. Researchers including Columbia University’s Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab describe a simple approach for developing a wearable AR system that uses position tracking to georegister multiple smaller maps from an existing tracking system. We recently visited this lab; watch the video here.
Speech Recognition. Recent years have witnessed the flourishing of podcasts, a unique type of audio medium. Prior work on podcast content modeling focused on analyzing Automatic Speech Recognition outputs, which ignored vocal, musical, and conversational properties such as humor and creativity. Researchers at Cornell Tech present an Adversarial Learning-based Podcast Representation (ALPR) that captures the non-textual aspects of podcasts. Through extensive experiments on a large-scale podcast dataset, the paper shows that measuring ALPR significantly improves the performance of topic-based podcast-popularity prediction.
Data Visualization. A team at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s Visualization and Data Analytics (VIDA) lab developed a framework called VisFlow, which can create highly flexible data visualizations from almost any data. And as a next step, the team also made it easier and more intuitive to edit these models by developing an extension of VisFlow called FlowSense, which allows users to synthesize data exploration pipelines through a natural language interface. The user can expand and adjust dataflow diagrams more conveniently using English.
Around Town
December 4. Made In NY Fellows 2019 Celebration. Learn about the technologies and creative projects to come out of Made in NY Media Center in 2019. The outgoing cohort will present their work across multi-medium platforms.
December 10. Disinfo 2020: Prepping the Press. Join a day-long conference from Columbia Journalism School to explore how disinformation will affect the 2020 election — and what we can do about it.
December 10. Cornell Tech Open Studio. During Open Studio, you’ll have the opportunity to see presentations and demos by students, faculty, PhDs, and others in the Cornell Tech community, giving you a view of the real-world products being built on campus.
December 15–16. ITP Winter Show. Interact with prototypes built by graduate and undergraduate students at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and Interactive Media Arts (IMA). This science-fair style exhibition will include new work in creative tech, VR/AR, data, storytelling and more.
March 6–8, 2020. HackNYU. Join NYU’s annual global hackathon held in New York, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi. Students are given the tools and space to create innovative solutions for challenges across four tracks: Sustainability, Education, Health & Well-being, and Financial Empowerment.
Opportunities
Reminder: Multiple Open Calls with NYC Media Lab. Faculty, students, and early-stage startups should browse through our open calls to explore what’s possible this fall.
NYC Media Lab is looking to build partnerships with other innovation-driven nonprofits. If you’re looking to collaborate on events, communications, or storytelling, send us a note here.
Deadline December 20: RLab is currently recruiting XR startups. The 12-week accelerator includes a residency at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (from March 9 to May 22) and potential equity investment from Super Ventures. Apply here.
Rolling Deadline: Our friends at Betaworks Studios recently launched new membership opportunities, with options for out-of-town, three month stays, and people under 25 years of age. The application to be a member is open here.
Join three weekly newsletters: On VR/AR from RLab and on Data Science and Corporate Innovation from NYC Media Lab. Subscribe here to receive a pick of useful news, research and industry insights on these topics. Contact info@nycmedialab.org with any questions, comments or tips. Please add newsletter@newsletter.nycmedialab.org to your email address book or Safe Sender List to ensure delivery of future communications from NYC Media Lab.
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