big data

Warning: You May Already Be Reading Computer-Generated Content

Posted by Joe Procopio | Mar 21, 2014

In an article today in The Daily Dot, I talked with writer Aaron Sankin about the proliferation of automated content in news stories. The article was inspired by a couple recent events. Two weeks ago, Karstad University’s Dr. Christer Clerwall published the findings of his study of automated content vs. human-written content in the 2014 volume of Journalism Practice. Dr. Clerwall used samples from Automated Insights’ StatSheet product (which Robbie Allen and I built over three years ago) to compare against actual journalist-written articles of the same NFL game. His conclusion: Not only is automated content virtually indistinguishable from...

All Things Open Comes to Raleigh on October 23rd

Posted by Joe Procopio | Oct 16, 2013

The last time I honestly gave a thought to the future of open source was back when I was downloading code snippets to save myself time prototyping applications. That’s not to say I don’t think about open source, but I don’t actively debate it the way I used to. These days, open is just the way to do things, from running on AWS to coding in Ruby on Rails to the app distribution model to sharing information over social media. Open just is. For me. And by me I mean an entrepreneur. To a lot of people, open is...

Automated Insights Makes Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge Semifinals

Posted by Joe Procopio | Dec 31, 2012

Durham’s big-data humanizer and personalized content creator Automated Insights, the company behind Yahoo Fantasy Football’s automated weekly Matchup Recaps, has been chosen as one of 24 semifinalists...

Deconstructing the Hackathon

Posted by Joe Procopio | Jul 8, 2012

The concept of a hackathon is not new. It’s sort of new for me, as my coding days ended long before it became cool to put all the geeks in a room for a couple days and let them go apeshit. In my day, a hackathon was networking together enough computers to play Quake. But I get the vibe. After all, I’m building ExitEvent.com with a team of me. If I want to include automated links for companies we mention in the articles to their websites or profile pages we create on the fly, it pretty much requires a...