Artificial intelligence for the news business

Personalized news, fake news, robot journalism, chatbots, machine translation: these are the trends in publishing houses and editorial offices around the world.

As one of the largest digital news services worldwide, these developments are also relevant for Microsoft News. There, news from 4,500 international media brands are curated and personalized to provide information to more than half a billion users per month. The software giant already uses algorithms and innovative technologies to filter relevant news individually and translate it automatically if required.

• Which services in the news business can still be improved with artificial intelligence?
• Which innovative offers and services can be redesigned?

These were the key questions in the practical cooperation between Macromedia University and Microsoft News.

The master students from the Munich campus, led by Prof. Dr. Dr. Castulus Kolo, competed in four teams to hand over a comprehensive evaluation and recommendation package to Microsoft News at the end of the semester. It contained the following chapters:

• Analysis of the competition and technology trends
• Identification of promising services
• Development of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
• Design of prototypes for the B2B and B2C sector

Dirk Kleine (Director Microsoft News DE/AT/CH) and Florian Stickel (Editor in Chief) from Microsoft News conducted the in-depth briefing. In the course of the semester, they were available to the students several times in group appointments for virtual shoulder glances. Above all, they closely followed the progress of the Macromedia teams – and were obviously so impressed by it that they gathered numerous European country managers from Microsoft News for the final presentation to the students.

At the end of the semester, the students were able to present themselves to a top-class audience of international executives who were full of praise for their achievements.

Microsoft managers from Italy, France, Finland, Austria, Dubai, England and Switzerland were among the participants.

Statement Practice Partner

“I am now conducting the third practical project with students from Macromedia University. Time and again, they open up important perspectives on certain topics. And not by chance, but as a product of systematic, well-founded approaches. The results and especially the prototype of a new and innovative news service have impressed me”.

Dirk Kleine
Director
Microsoft News DE/AT/CH
https://news.microsoft.com/