"Spheres of Influence"

On Friday, 1st of December, Dr. Alexander Villacorta and Julie Dillemuth with colleagues presented their project called Spheres of Influence. The project builds, for instance, on the project on Multi-Domain Geovisualization of News Stories (see also a Flash demo on the Terry Schiavo case.

From the left: Timo Honkela (TKK, Finland), Alex Villacorta,
Julie Dillemuth and colleagues at UCSB.

The objective of the project is to analyze the geographical and temporal movement of information, specifically headline news stories in newspapers and relate this movement with the location of the news events in space and time. They had used geographical maps on which they position the news. They had also conducted some experiments with the self-organizing map algorithm. We discussed how it would be interesting if it was possible to analyze the news contents regarding the differences in their point of view. In order to do so, one would need also high-quality machine translation tools to ensure a global coverage. In the project, their already use some tools to translate from some European languages into English.