Northwestern University’s News at Seven

News at Seven is a recent project launched by Northwestern University (my Alma Mater). This thing is really amazing. It is a completely automatic news generator. Using characters from Half-Life, the program creates a news feed by scraping news sites, blogs, videos and more to create a news program with absolutely no human intervention. Check out a recent episode:

Their website states:

News at Seven is an automatic system that crafts daily news shows. It finds the news you are interested in; edits it; finds relevant images, videos, and external opinions; and then presents it all using a virtual news team working in a virtual studio. News at Seven is a uniquely compelling experience that can present traditional news–augmented with supplemental images, videos, and opinions from the blogosphere—all without human intervention.

Because News at Seven is completely automatic, there is no limit to when it can be run or what it can present; the content and presentation form are completely customizable. News at Seven users can express interest in geo-politics, sports, entertainment, or local news and be given a news show tailored to their interests. They can also alter the way that the news in presented, from which anchor to use to what environment each story is presented in. Any world that can be built and any character that can be crafted can be integrated into the News at Seven experience. Sports stories can be presented by a player at a football game, stories of geo-political conflict can be presented by a soldier in the field and entertainment news and gossip presented by an actor walking down a red carpet. If we can imagine it, we can build it and you can see it.

Read the complete description here.

This program comes out of Northwestern University’s Intelligent Information Laboratory (InfoLab). It is a new project and is something unlike anything I’ve seen before.