NYC Media Lab Podcast

This episode was recorded at the Fake News Horror Show, an event NYC Media Lab hosted on June 7th and 8th, 2018 to explore the problems of propaganda and misinformation. Clint Watts, a former FBI Special Agent, U.S. Army officer and leading cyber-security expert, gave a keynote presentation on his recently published book, Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News.

This discussion was recorded at Machines+Media 2018. While discussion of potential new regulations for technology companies is somewhat muted in the United States, it is raging in the UK and Europe. While many observers agree more transparency and accountability for the platforms is desirable, new rules could have unintended consequences. What are the parameters for healthy regulation? Panelists included Paul Barrett, NYU Center for Business and Human Rights; Kevin Carty, Open Markets Institute; Nicholas Thompson, WIRED; and Claire Wardle, Shorenstein Center. Justin Hendrix, Executive Director of NYC Media Lab moderated the discussion.

On April 23rd, 2018, betaworks CEO John Borthwick hosted a discussion on how regulation could fix Facebook with author Andrew Keen, WIRED journalist Jessi Hempel and early Facebook investor Roger McNamee.

This episode features a discussion at Machines+Media, NYC Media Lab’s conference on how applications of data science are changing media, hosted at Bloomberg on May 15th, 2018. During the day’s opening session, Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait led a discussion with Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel and Clay Shirky, Vice Provost for Educational Technologies at New York University, about the intersection between technology, media and democracy. The issue touched on topics ranging from net neutrality and the concentration of media ownership to misinformation and privacy.

Evan Nisselson is General Partner & Founder of LDV Capital, a thesis-driven early stage venture fund investing in people building visual technology businesses that leverage computer vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data. He's also the host of LDV Vision Summit, a global gathering on visual tech that takes place May 23 & 24, 2018 in New York City.

At a gathering of the Tech, Media & Democracy course at Columbia Journalism School, BuzzFeed media editor Craig Silverman discusses his investigations of fraud in the ad tech ecosystem, and New York Times journalists Gabriel Dance and Nick Confessore discuss their recent investigation of fraudulent social media followers for an article called The Follower Factory.

The term "Fake news” has come to mean anything from deliberate misinformation to "news I don't agree with". How can technology be harnessed to address these issues? What tools are needed for journalists to better understand and respond to misinformation dissemination on different platforms? What's the best way to respond to credibility attacks? Is fact-checking effective? How might we use technology to set truth-seeking organizations apart? With Panelists: Gilad Lotan, BuzzFeed VP, Head of Data Science (host and moderator) Sasha Koren, Editor, Guardian Mobile Lab Alexis Lloyd, Chief Design Officer, Axios Cory Haik, Chief Strategy Officer, Mic Benjamin Decker, Security Researcher, Storyful

News organizations and journalists face unprecedented legal, cyber and physical threats. The second event in the Tech, Media & Democracy series explores the risks and what can be done with panelists including Jim Rutenberg, Media Columnist, New York Times; Jameel Jaffer, Director, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University; Wael Ghonim, Fellow, Shorenstein Center, Harvard; Yasmin Green, Director of Research & Development, Jigsaw; and Runa Sandvik, Director of Information Security, New York Times.

This is the first in a series of panels throughout Fall 2017 that address the most intractable issues at the intersection of journalism and technology. Moderated by Brian Stelter, Host of Reliable Sources and Senior Media Correspondent, CNN, this discussion features Joanna Geary, Head of Curation, Twitter; Raju Narisetti, CEO, Gizmodo Media Group; and Aron Pilhofer, James B. Steele Chair in Journalism Innovation, Temple University. The discussion took place on Thursday, Oct 26th 6pm, at CNN, and sought to identify the issues and begin to set an agenda to explore solutions for trust, business models, and platforms. Lots of things are broken. How do we prioritize what to fix first? Who should be able to help? How can technology help?

This episode was recorded at NYC Media Lab’s Annual Summit, hosted at Columbia University on September 22nd. It features a conversation on VR storytelling and prototyping featuring Rob Ruffler, Senior Director of Viacom NEXT, the emerging technology group for Viacom and its brands, and three individuals who participated in a fellowship NYC Media Lab ran with Viacom in the summer of 2016 on virtual reality storytelling, including Tomonari Michigami, a recent graduate of the School of Visual Arts; Rosalind Paradis, a recent graduate of the Parsons MFA in Design and Technology; and Michelle Senteio, a Master’s Candidate at the NYU Game Center.

This episode was recorded at NYC Media Lab’s Annual Summit, hosted at Columbia University on September 22nd. It features a conversation on the next three years in virtual reality and storytelling with panelists including Kai Bond, the General Manager of the Samsung Accelerator; Ken Perlin, computer scientists and Director of the Games for Learning Institute at NYU; Adaora Udoji, an angel investor; and Jake Zim, the Senior Vice President of Virtual Reality at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

This episode was recorded at NYC Media Lab’s Annual Summit, hosted at Columbia University on September 22nd. It features the morning keynote address delivered by Jim Bankoff, Chairman and CEO of Vox Media. Vox brands include SB Nation, The Verge, Polygon, Eater, Curbed, Racked, and of course the news site Vox. A veteran of digital media, Bankoff was previously executive vice president of programming and products at AOL, where he developed and led dozens of popular websites including AOL, Mapquest, Moviefone, AOL Music, and Engadget. He also co-founded TMZ.com.

This episode features a panel discussion on future interfaces recorded at NYC Media Lab’s IoT Media Mash event, which took place June 8th, 2016 at Viacom. The session was moderated by Chaki Ng, Head of New Experiences at Viacom, and panelists included Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments, betaworks; Mari Joller, Founder and CEO, Scarlet; Katherine Moriwaki, Assistant Professor, Parsons MFADT; and Patrick Givens, Director, Smart Innovations, VaynerMedia. From artificial intelligence powered conversational interfaces to gesture and touch based interactions to augmented reality, this panel considers the future of human computer interaction.

This episode features a panel discussion on hardware and software trends for the Internet of Things recorded at NYC Media Lab’s IoT Media Mash event, which took place June 8th at Viacom. The panelists include John Kymissis, a professor in the Columbia Laboratory for Unconventional Electronics at Columbia University; Ohad Zeira, Director if IoT & Connected Home at Verizon; Angelia Müller, Program Manager for Techstars IoT; and Chris Rill, Chief Technology Officer for the startup company Canary.

This episode was recorded at The New School on April 18th, and features a debate prompted by the rise in the phenomenon of ad blocking about the future of the ad tech ecosystem. The debate started on Twitter between Alex Kantrowitz, Senior Technology reporter at BuzzFeed and Joe Marchese, President of Advanced Advertising at Fox Networks Group. David Carroll, a professor in the Design & Technology MFA program at Parsons School of Design and a regular writer and commentator on ad tech and ad blocking, offered to host a live version of the debate at The New School, The proposition for the debate was "The collapse of the ad tech ecosystem would be a good thing." Joe Marchese, the advertising media exec, argued for the proposition; Alex Kantrowitz, the technology reporter, argued against it.

This episode was recorded at NYC Media Lab’s September 2015 Annual Summit. It features a keynote address and discussion with Rita Gunther McGrath, a Professor at Columbia Business School and a globally recognized expert on strategy in uncertain and volatile environments. She is the co-author of three books- the latest is The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast As Your Business, published by Harvard Business Review Press. The conversation is moderated by Orin Herskowitz, Vice President of Intellectual Property and Tech Transfer for Columbia University and Executive Director of Columbia Technology Ventures.

In this episode Ted Bailey, CEO, Founder and Chairman of Dataminr, a New York City startup that transforms real-time data from Twitter and other public sources into actionable signals, delivers the 2015 Glenn A. Britt keynote lecture at the NYC Media Lab Annual Summit. Moderated by Paul Horn, Senior Vice Provost for Research at NYU.

This episode is the third in a three part series on data, digital advertising and the phenomenon of ad blocking. We hear from David Carroll, associate professor of media design in the MFA Design and Technology graduate program at Parsons The New School for Design, who has written about a variety of issues in digital media, including recently about the rise of ad blocking technologies.

This episode is the second of a three part series on data, digital advertising and the phenomenon of ad blocking. We hear from Claudia Perlich, who is Chief Scientist at Dstillery, where she develops the machine learning that drives digital advertising. Perlich is also a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, where she teaches a course on data mining for business intelligence.

This episode is the first of a three part series on data, digital advertising and the phenomenon of ad blocking. In the first installment in the series we hear from Doc Searls, the influential blogger and author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and Director of Project VRM at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he served as a fellow from 2006 to 2010.