Medium’s Chief Architect Xiao Ma spoke at Stanford on Nov. 5th asking the question: How does technology reshape content discovery and delivery? He unpacked Medium’s on-point recommendation system, a hybrid model that joins collaborative filtering (“How can we recommend content based on your previous history and people similar to you?”) and content-based filtering (“I don’t
AuthorAnn Grimes
A Taxonomy for VR
Eve Weston, CEO and founder of Los-Angeles based VR studio Exelauno told Stanford students that she has developed a way to talk about VR — what she calls a “taxonomy” for VR. This taxonomy unpacks the emotional intensity of the VR experience into its key parts: Narrative (1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person?) Visual Options (Embodied
Rethinking Audio @ Stanford with Google News
Rethinking Audio: Michael Mellody and Liz Gannes, Google News The rise of virtual assistants increasingly allows us to be informed, enlightened and entertained when our hands and eyes are busy. Demand is high: home assistants commanded a 40 percent year over year growth. Increasingly, people want news through these mediums, throughout the day – especially
Stanford Welcomes Washington Post’s Director of Engineering
Stanford welcomed Jeremy Bowers, Director of Engineering, at The Washington Post. Bowers and his team are ramping up for the 2020 election, focusing on political data projects including election restyles, congressional votes and campaign finance. Bowers spoke on October 15 to an interdisciplinary group of Stanford students (compute science, engineering and business, among others). He
Stanford Welcomes Wired Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson
On October 8, The Brown Institute at Stanford welcomed Wired magazine Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson who joined Stanford Brown Director, Maneesh Agrawala, for an in-depth conversation about the state of the media and technology. The two discussed the trajectory of Thompson’s journalistic career – from The Washington Monthly, to The New Yorker.com, The Atavist, to Wired and
Stanford Welcomes Neil Chase, CEO of CalMatters.org
How to Create a Culture of Innovation – especially in a legacy media company? That was the question Neil Chase, CEO of the nonprofit news site CalMatters.org, addressed at Stanford on October 1. Formerly Editor-in-Chief of The San Jose Mercury News, Chase spoke about the local newspaper as an essential utility whose various core functions have
Frameworks for Predicting the Next Big Trends in Tech
Industry-shifting opportunities come along about every five-to-ten years. In this Sept. 24th conversation at Stanford, Ceci Stallsmith, Slack’s Director of Platform Marketing, outlined her methodology for detecting platform shifts before it’s too late to jump on a trend. Given that the media industry is incredibly trend-driven and that the impact of innovation seems
Brown Institute Welcomes Technology Journalist Kara Swisher
On May 2, Brown welcomed technology journalist Kara Swisher, co-founder of Recode and a contributing writer to The New York Times Opinion Section. She previously wrote for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, and served as executive editor of All Things Digital. Swisher discussed the state of the technology industry and shared her perspectives on media trends
Nicholas Diakopoulos @ Stanford: “Automating the News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the News”
From hidden connections in big data to bots spreading fake news, journalism is increasingly computer generated. Nicholas Diakopoulos, an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University’s School of Communication, and an expert in computer science and media, discussed the present and future of journalism in a world in which news is created by algorithms. Here’s more from The Stanford