'News at Seven' is a fully automated approach to creating broadcast news developed at Northwestern University's Intelligent Information Laboratory (InfoLab). Starting with news stories in textual form (either selected manually, or found automatically using a programmable preference model), the system is able to edit the stories for broadcast presentation, find relevant background visual materials (e.g., videos and still images), and augment the primary text using sources such as blogs found on the Web. Together, these resources are then used to drive a set of animated characters who reside in a virtual 'news world' we have created for them.
This project is developing tools that will better enable content providers, who are not computing professionals, to prepare the necessary information aggregation and presentation capabilities for news delivery within niche populations with special information needs.
