Quartz AI Studio is an open source platform that will aid data journalists in sifting through mountains of documents for the relevant material. Project leader John Keefe said that machine learning and other AI techniques will help speed up such tedious searches.
Marcela Kunova describes how the new open source platform can help journalists in this report published in journalism.co.uk
“…for the machine learning we think can help support reporters, the applications are far more specific. More like: ‘Computer, here are 100 examples of the pattern I’m looking for. Please find more of those this in this pile of 1 million records.’”
The good news is that machine-learning tools available via the platform can help journalists analyze data even if they have no coding or maths skills.
Keefe explained that computers can help journalists with various tasks, such as categorizing (for example marking messages as ‘important’ or ‘spam’). Machines are also better at spotting patterns within huge datasets whether these are words, numbers or pictures. Finally, artificial intelligence comes with some capability to make predictions based on what happened in the past.
“Machine learning can help solve these problems and Quartz tries to bring these solutions to smaller newsrooms that often haven’t got resources to do this themselves,” said Keefe. “Many journalists don’t even recognize what stories could benefit from machine learning. And when they do, they often wonder how to go about it.”
