Updates from the open source AI hackathon
More than 100 journalists, coders, and product designers spent a weekend together in New York earlier in April to participate in the first of a series of hackathons convened designed to push the limits of the technology for journalism.
To kick off the series, hackathon participants spent three days exploring how AI might enable new, personalized experiences for journalism audiences, how to train large language models to increase accuracy and trust, and how to design platforms that ensure a human is always kept in the loop.
What will an AI-influenced information ecosystem look like in five years?
What will an AI-influenced information ecosystem look like in five years, and how can journalism as a discipline better work with large language models and other powerful technologies? What role should journalism play in a world of hyper-personalized content?
To discuss these questions and more, Hacks/Hackers hosted an AI x Journalism House in the heart of downtown Austin alongside SXSW, Austin’s annual mega-festival devoted to the convergence of technology, film and music.
Join Hacks/Hackers and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University for an in-person open-source AI hackathon, starting at 5pm ET on Friday, April 5th. The hackathon is sponsored by Hugging Face and Codingscape.
Participants in the hackathon will spend a weekend building with open-source AI for experiments relating to journalism and civic information. We invite people with little-to-no technical background, as well as those who might be expert in Machine Learning and AI.
We have a chance to try again and learn from the tortured history between technology companies and journalism.
It is truly magical to speak to a machine using the same language you’d use to talk to a human. And that initial awe at the technology commonly known as generative AI caught a lot of us in the hype over artificial intelligence this past year.
We also learned that while the large language models (LLMs) that power generative AI are great at stringing words together, they have a tendency to BS their way through it.
Greetings from Buenos Aires!
I’ve spent the last few days at the Media Party that Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires has put on for the fourth year in a row, bringing hundreds of people to be inspired, collaborate and hack together. It’s an amazing event that shows the potential of what we can do if we work together on a broader level.
With Hacks/Hackers organizers from around the world present, we held a workshop to talk about how we as the global Hacks/Hackers movement can collaborate more across geographic boundaries.
[View the story “Hacks/Hackers launches Connect series in Berlin” on Storify]
Hacks/Hackers launches Connect series in Berlin Around 100 journalists and technologists passionate about the future of media joined the weekend event in the German capital Storified by Burt Herman· Sun, Jun 28 2015 22:04:05
We kicked off Hacks/Hackers' first-ever global event series with a packed room of more than 100 participants at the Berlin Factory, bringing together members of the grassroots movement along with entrepreneurs, journalists and developers passionate about the intersection of media and technology.
A few weeks ago, we launched an exciting initiative (in partnership with Google) to support media entrepreneurship, an event series we call Connect. As part of the launch, we decided to replace the main Hacks/Hackers site with an information and signup page for Connect.
At the time, that seemed to make sense. The old site was years out of date, filled with months-old content and daily traffic had fallen to the single-digits.
More than 150 hacks and hackers gathered Wednesday at Twitter’s main headquarters in San Francisco to hear the company’s Data Editor Simon Rogers talk about data’s increasingly important role in journalism and how Twitter makes sense of the hundreds of millions of tweets passing through its platform every day.
From mapping the patterns of disadvantage that contributed to the UK riots, to data visualizations of Oscars tweets, Rogers helped demystify the collection strategies and tools required for top-class data analysis and visualization.
The latest Hacks/Hackers event brought together the creator of Pocket and Matter, and a former Wired.com head editor to talk about ways to make money from serious journalism
Hacks/Hackers has surpassed the 10,000 member mark just two and half years after its start as a Meetup group in the Bay Area.