CORBY - intelligent assistant
for journalists
TOOL TO HELP JOURNALISTS
Finding relevant information among huge amounts of data is a real problem for journalists today. We at Emblica wanted to use machine learning to liberate journalists to do what they are best at: creating better journalism by using wider amount of sources than ever before. And by doing so, to better inform citizens and support democracy. In this project, a working prototype of Corby was developed for Suomen Kuvalehti, the leading Finnish current affairs weekly. Corby is an intelligent assistant for journalists. It helps journalists by following and reading vast amounts of source material to search for news and connections that would otherwise be hard to find. Corby is built in the form of an search engine that enables the journalists to search public documents and find relevant sources for articles. Corby is also able to detect entities such as people, companies and places from the documents and find the direct connections between them. This makes the job of a journalist much faster in terms of finding out what roles people have for example in public decision making. |
MY ROLE
My role in the project included design research, service design and user interface design. I worked on the initial prototype together with my colleagues Joni Salmi, Vladimir Shemyakin and Riku Pelkonen who were in charge of project management and engineering. The project was done in data engineering company Emblica for Suomen Kuvalehti with the funding from Google's Digital News Innovation Fund. |
futures studies
& Design combined
GETTING ACQUAINTED WITH RESEARCH
In my Bachelor's thesis I interviewed designers to find out why they should utilize futures studies as part of their work and what kind of design actually benefits from futurology. My work takes also a quick look into the methods designers would need in order to start using futures studies actively as part of their work. For my thesis I interviewed six designers currently working in Finland either as consultants or in-house designers. My thesis introduces the reader to the ideas they wanted to share from the professional perspective of a designer. |
MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACH
This thesis was inspired by my minor subject studies in Futurology which was a joined program between Aalto University and the University of Turku. I prepared for the thesis by doing the interviews and by writing an initial essay of the topic from the perspective of Futures studies which helped me to find the final framing. |