AI & Local News Community Talk: Applied XL

In this community talk we’ll dive into Applied XL with co-founder & CEO Francesco Marconi. AppliedXL “uses machine learning to monitor industry databases and make sense of disparate data streams, surfacing signals before they become news.”

Our discussion will focus on the emerging approach of surfacing “pre-news” signals. We’ll explore the company’s computational journalism methodology, how they got started, and what’s next. Then we’ll open up for discussion.

This community talk is designed for people developing or interested in AI and automation applications for news and journalism. This includes startups, professionals, academics and students.

Applied XL AppliedXL is an event detection company that combines the horsepower of machine learning and the principles of investigative journalism to anticipate the news before it happens. They’ve received investment from Hearst Ventures with the participation of Newlab, Tuesday Capital and the Boston Globe Media Partners and more. In January 2022, AppliedXL partnered with the leading health and medicine media company STAT to launch STAT Trials Pulse.

Francesco Marconi Francesco is a computational journalist who previously served as R&D Chief at The Wall Street Journal and AI co-lead at the Associated Press. He was an Adjunct Instructor at Columbia Journalism School and a Research Associate at the Laboratory for Social Machines at MIT Media Lab.His latest book "Newsmakers: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism” was published by Columbia University Press in January 2020.

The AI & Local News Initiative The AI & Local News initiative–supported by Knight Foundation–helps local news organizations harness the power of artificial intelligence to drive success through projects with the Associated Press, Brown Institute’s Local News Lab, NYC Media Lab, and Partnership on AI.