Deadline: 1-Dec-21
NYC Media Lab has launched applications for its AI & Local News Challenge, an opportunity for five startup and university teams to develop and advance projects that use AI to address the needs of news organizations.
This Challenge–supported by Knight Foundation–will help local news organizations harness the power of artificial intelligence.
What size teams can apply?
- The team participating in the program must be between 2 and 5 members. The startups or organizations that teams are affiliated with can be larger.
What kind of teams are you looking for?
- They’re looking for interdisciplinary teams with experience in fields including–but not limited to– product development, software development, computer science, creative technology, data science, advertising tech, video production, audio production, business, operations, investigative journalism and engagement journalism.
- They don’t require experience building products for journalists or news organizations, but they do expect a curiosity and willingness to learn the nuances of the ever-changing news industry.
What types of projects are you looking for?
- They’re looking for projects that use tools under the broad umbrella of artificial intelligence to enhance and enable quality journalism and/or sustainable news organizations. Those tools and approaches include–but are not limited to–automation, algorithms, machine learning, computer vision, deep learning, recommendation systems, natural language processing and natural language generation.
- They prefer projects that are past the early discovery phase. The projects that will best match this Challenge should already have a theory of which problems they might solve for which customers. Teams should be ready to prototype and iterate on their project through the Challenge and potentially to pilot with news organizations and/or to receive feedback from journalists.
What happens at the end of the Challenge?
- At the end of the program teams will present their work as part of a Demo Day. Project details and excerpts from the Demo Day may be showcased and shared with the general public and the NYC Media Lab community.
- A panel of judges will then award two teams with a grand prize of $15,000 and a second place prize of $7,500.
- After the Challenge, teams may have the opportunity to further develop project pilots and experiments with partner news organizations.
Eligibility Criteria
- Applications are open to university teams, startup teams and teams based at news organizations.
- Startups and news organization teams should serve customers based in the United States and have a United States presence and/or be registered in the United States.
- Team leads for university teams should be affiliated with US-based universities.
For more information, visit https://www.nycmedialab.org/ai-local-news-challenge