Speaker: 

Andrés Monroy-Hernández

Microsoft Research

Title:

Collaborative News: From “Narcotweets” to Journalism-as-a-Service

Abstract:

How do people living in the midst of war use social media, and what can we learn from them to design the next generation of news technologies?  In this presentation, I start by narrating how residents of cities afflicted by the Mexican Drug War use social media to circumvent censorship imposed by powerful drug cartels. I show how these people have created effective alert networks to generate real-time reports of violent events, and how some individuals have emerged as a new type of “war correspondent.” I end by presenting a number of civic technologies we have developed inspired by this research.

Bio:

Andrés Monroy-Hernández is a researcher at Microsoft Research, and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. His work focuses on the design and study of social computing systems for large scale collaboration. His research has received best paper awards at several computing conferences, recognized at Ars Electronica, and featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and Wired. Andrés was named one of the TR35 Innovators by the MIT Technology Review (Spanish), and one of CNET's influential Latinos in Tech. He holds a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab, where he led the creation of the Scratch Online Community website.