Conferencia Magistral en Computación: "Collaborative News: From “Narcotweets” to Journalism-as-a-Service"
Andrés Monroy-Hernández - Microsoft Research

Ciclo de Conferencias Magistrales en Computación @ITAM Otoño 2014

Abstract:
How do people living in the midst of war use social media, and what can we learn from them to design the next generation of news technologies? In this presentation, I start by narrating how residents of cities afflicted by the Mexican Drug War use social media to circumvent censorship imposed by powerful drug cartels. I show how these people have created effective alert networks to generate real-time reports of violent events, and how some individuals have emerged as a new type of “war correspondent.” Then I present two systems we have developed inspired by these findings: NewsPad, a collaborative text editor for community-sourced stories, and Eventful, a system that explores the concept of journalism as a service using locative crowdsourcing.

Bio:
Andrés Monroy-Hernández is a researcher in FUSE Labs at Microsoft Research, and an affiliate faculty in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. His work focuses on the design and study of social computing systems for collaborative creativity and collective action. He was named one of the TR35 Innovators by the MIT Technology Review in Spanish, one of CNET's influential Latinos in Tech, and one of Boston's Emerging Leaders by the Boston Business Journal. His research has received best paper awards at numerous ACM and AAAI conferences, recognized at Ars Electronica, and featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, and El País. Andrés holds a Ph.D. and Master’s from the MIT Media Lab, and a B.S. from Tec de Monterrey.