Northwestern University's Intelligent Information Laboratory built systems for finding, contextualizing, and making sense of information — much of it aimed at journalism and the problem of what a reader needs to know that a story does not say.
Projects
- The News Context Project — an open-source toolkit for assembling the context around a news article: related discussion, circulating quotations, and remarks from the stakeholders a story names
- The Local Angle — surfacing national stories with local significance by linking articles to the places behind the people and organizations in them
- Listening Post — letting organizations respond directly to questions and comments on social platforms
Publications
Both InfoLab projects produced peer-reviewed work — see Publications.People I worked with at the InfoLab
Larry BirnbaumProfessor of computer science at Northwestern and co-director of its Intelligent Information Laboratory. Co-founded Narrative Science and was its chief scientific adviser.LinkedIn ↗
Kristian HammondBill and Cathy Osborn Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern and director of its Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence. Co-founded Narrative Science and was its chief scientist.LinkedIn ↗
Sara Owsley SoodChookaszian Family Teaching Professor of computer science at Northwestern and founding director of its undergraduate AI major. Her research is on emotion and sentiment in online communication.Northwestern ↗
Sanjay SoodSenior vice president and chief digital and technology officer at AAR; previously CTO of CDW and an engineering leader at HERE Technologies. PhD in computer science from Northwestern, 2007, under Kristian Hammond and Larry Birnbaum.AAR ↗
Nick AllenLead author of StatsMonkey, the data-driven sports story writer built at the InfoLab that became Narrative Science, where he then worked. M.S.J. from Northwestern's Medill, 2009, as one of its programmer-journalist scholars; B.S. in computer science from Oregon State. Now in Portland.GitHub ↗
Miriam BoonScience journalist turned researcher. Did doctoral work in Technology and Social Behavior at Northwestern, building journalism prototypes at the InfoLab; now at the University of Regina.LinkedIn ↗
Jason CohnDoctoral candidate in computer science at Northwestern's InfoLab, applying natural language processing to social and news media; co-author of AttitudeBuzz.Google Scholar ↗
Francisco IacobelliAssociate professor of health informatics and data science at Loyola University Chicago, working on AI and interfaces for low-literacy and Latino communities in healthcare; formerly taught computer science at Northeastern Illinois University. PhD from Northwestern's InfoLab, 2011.Faculty page ↗
Alex KuntzDoctoral student in computer science at Northwestern's InfoLab, in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing; co-author of AttitudeBuzz. Carleton College, 2009.LinkedIn ↗
Jiahui LiuPhD in computer science from Northwestern's InfoLab, 2009, advised by Larry Birnbaum, with research on Spectrum, LocalSavvy, and Compare & Contrast; went to Google after the PhD. B.E. from Zhejiang University.Northwestern page ↗
Nate NicholsVP of product management and head of generative AI at Tableau, Salesforce; previously chief scientist at Narrative Science, with more than forty patents on text generation. PhD in artificial intelligence from Northwestern, 2010.Salesforce ↗
Shawn O'BanionSenior software engineering manager at Google, working on large-scale machine learning. PhD in computer science from Northwestern, where he built The Local Angle at the InfoLab.LinkedIn ↗
Adam ShawDeveloper and founder of FullCalendar, the open-source JavaScript calendar toolkit. B.S. in computer science and film from Northwestern, where he did research at the InfoLab.Personal site ↗
Mike SmathersSoftware developer in Chicago, at Narrative Science after the lab; on the InfoLab staff on Listening Post.GitHub ↗
Heather SmithSpatial artist and creative director working in augmented, virtual, and mixed reality, now as Heather Dunaway Smith; earlier an animator and designer on the InfoLab staff on News at Seven. B.A. in interactive multimedia from Columbia College Chicago.Personal site ↗
John R. TemplonStaff engineer at GameChanger in New York. Before that, an investigative data journalist and data editor at BuzzFeed News, and one of the first employees of Narrative Science, the startup that came out of the InfoLab. M.S.J. from Northwestern's Medill, 2009.Personal site ↗
Akira ThompsonStudio head and game director at RainBros in Osaka, previously creative director at Universal Studios Japan and a Disney Imagineer; a character designer on News at Seven in 2007 and 2008. B.A. from Columbia College Chicago, M.S. from UC Santa Cruz.LinkedIn ↗
Earl J. WagnerHead of technology at Paths in Chicago, formerly a senior software engineer at Google. PhD in computer science from Northwestern, 2009, advised by Larry Birnbaum.LinkedIn ↗
Jennifer WilsonDeveloper at Northwestern's Intelligent Information Laboratory and the Knight Lab, with a background in software startups; now at Test Innovators. Bachelor's in economics and MMSS from Northwestern, M.S. in computer science from DePaul.LinkedIn ↗