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CRUNCH: 2011-2012 Student Design Challenge
ipad  We hope your projects are well under way. Stay tuned on the CRUNCH page for updates, changes, and due dates for the challenge! Don't forget to also stay updated on our Events calendar, where you can find the schedule for CRUNCH workshops. Good luck!
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Innovation Lab supports Bike Tour of South L.A.
ipad  As part of its ongoing relationship with CicLAvia, the Annenberg Innovation Lab supported a cycling event last Sunday which encouraged cyclists to take photos and recordings for a 'crowd-sourced' map of their route from Augustus Hawkins Natural Park in South L.A.'s Central-Alameda neighborhood to the Watts Tower.  The LA Times covered the groundbreaking event.
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Journalism Director's Forum: Melanie Sill
ipad
Join Annenberg School of Journalism Director, Geneva Olverholser, for a discussion with the author of "The Case for Open Journalism Now: A new framework for informing communities" and former executive-in-residence, Melanie Sill. The Lab recently published this provoking online discussion paper, and now you'll have a chance to hear her speak next week! Don't miss it!

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Sloan Science Seminar presents Virtual Reality: The New Frontier
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If you're a virtual reality enthusiast or tech junkie, you don't want to miss this engagement. Come converse with the USC Institute for Creative Technologies Creative Director Kim LeMasters, Institute for Creative Technologies Associate Director for Medical VR Albert “Skip” Rizzo, and digital media designer and artist Peggy Weil.

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Lead or Follow
ipad  Some stories aren’t well-suited to linear narrative. Some issues aren’t best explained from a single perspective. So how do you take the deep knowledge of specialists and find ways to stir it together with a broader community in which there is hidden expertise? ArtsJournal will bring together prominent arts administrators, artists, curators, and journalists....

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Poynter on Open Journalism
ipad  Melanie Sill describes journalism as a "discipline of action". She delves into how she began practicing open journalism and gives her thoughts on "The Case for Open Journalism" in this Poynter article.
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Trojan Hack
ipad  The Lab is now sponsoring Trojan Hack: a 24-hour hackathon where university students come together to represent their schools and see who's the best! It's USC vs. UCLA, you don't want to miss it so sign up soon!
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CRUNCH Student Design Challenge - Spring Orientation
ipad

 So you heard about our 2011-2012 CRUNCH Student Design Challenge and want a shot at winning $30,000 in prizes?  Don't miss our Spring orientation session on Wednesday, January 18. 


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Cooney Center Collaboration
ipad  In late 2011, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop began a new collaborative relationship with the Innovation Lab. The Center's most recent fellow, Becky Herr Stephenson, details some of the exciting new projects that she will be working on with the Lab over the next year.
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5 Tenets of Open Journalism on PBS MediaShift
ipad  "The Case for Open Journalism Now," a project created by Melanie Sill (pictured left) and developed at the Annenberg Innovation Lab, presents an argument for more participatory journalism practices. Sill highlights the 5 main principles of Open Journalism in a recent blog post on PBS MediaShift. "I'm not a middle-of-the-roader and wasn't aiming for a compromise position," she says. "Instead, I sought to identify and propel a culture shift that might build a healthier relationship among those who produce journalism and others who consume news and information."
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Project Spotlight: Live Tweet Sentiment Analysis
ipad

Check out this video spotlight on the Innovation Lab’s recent experiment in live Twitter sentiment analysis! The project was lead by Francois Bar, research-design director, and Hao Wang, research assistant.


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AP-Google Scholarship
ipad
The AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship program will provide $20,000 scholarships for the 2012-13 academic year to six promising undergraduate or graduate students pursuing or planning to pursue degrees at the intersection of journalism, computer science and new media. The program is targeted to individual students creating innovative projects that further the ideals of digital journalism.
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Funds for Women to "Rock the World of Journalism"
ipad  The McCormick New Media Women Entrepreneurs program will fund U.S.-based individuals who have original ideas for new web sites, mobile news services, or other entrepreneurial initiatives that offer interactive opportunities to engage, inspire, and improve news and information in a geographic community or a community of interest.
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Spreadable Media
ipad  Innovation Lab chief advisor, Henry Jenkins, discussed the shifting relations between media producers and their audiences at the recent Futures of Entertainment conference (FoE5). Watch the full panel video. 
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Geek Hunt
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The Innovation Lab's newest partner, EPB, (one of the largest publicly owned fiber optics and power companies) is hunting for the brightest students and entrepreneurs (geeks) to test new applications on Chattanooga’s gigabit-per-second capable network with thousands of end users, plus have access to mentors and the chance to win significant cash and seed capital. Please share the link below with colleagues, students, and friends who may be able to take advantage of this great program.

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Young Digital Entrepreneurs Panel - Video
ipad  Missed our Young Digital Entrepreneurs Panel? Or simply want to revisit this lively discussion about the keys to success in the digital world? We've got you covered. The full event video is now available.
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Podcast - Cities and the Future of Entertainment
ipad  As a prologue to the Futures of Entertainment conference, this Forum focused on the emergence of powerful new  production cultures in such cities as Mumbai, Shanghai, and Rio de Janeiro and announced the Innovation Lab's partnership with some of Brazil's foremost industry players. 
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Annenberg Innovators Wanted for Visioneering Day
ipad
Ten students and three alumni from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism will be selected to participate in the first  X Prize Foundation Visioneering Day at USC, which will take place on January 27, 2012. The X Prize Foundation is a grant organization that challenges private teams to find solutions to global issues, providing multimillion-dollar awards as an incentive. Visioneering Day is a day of activities and brainstorming designed to spark ideas that will be developed into an X PRIZE to incentivize innovations that address issues of global health. We're currently accepting applications from interested students and alumni.

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2011 UK-US COLLABORATION IN DIGITAL ECONOMY AWARD
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The UK Science & Innovation Network is pleased to accept applications for the collaboration development award programme, with a focus on research addressing the digital economy. These awards provide funding so that UK and US scientists, engineers, academic leaders and innovation experts can travel abroad for short visits to lay the groundwork for collaborative efforts. The programme is sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) and Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s (FCO) Global Partnership Fund. Download application here.

Questions? Please e-mail nicholas.hooper@fco.gov.uk.

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Fast Company Covers AIL / IBM Dive into Baseball Analytics
ipad  Bet you never thought social media played an important role in baseball. Well, it does. With today's technologically savvy individuals, social media is just as important to the game as keeping score, downing a couple beers or enjoying your favorite Dodger dog. AIL is partnering with IBM to explore these new social tools and the unrestricted research they provide on fan's experiences and perspectives. Using advanced technology, the partnership aims to unveil the hidden feelings behind Twitterverse around this year's #postseason, and many other baseball trends. Fast Company's expert blog covers the innovative collaboration.
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DESIGNING CULTURE Book Launch
ipad  What would it mean to take culture seriously in the design of innovative technologies? Anne Balsamo, Director of Emergent Technologies and Culture at AIL addresses this question in her new transmedia book, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Duke University Press).  In her examination of three sites of the technological imagination (the industrial R&D center, the science-technology museum, and the research university)  illustrates how the process of technological innovation produces not only new devices and applications, but also sets in place the foundation for the creation of cultures in the future.
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Jon Taplin - Most Social Media Savvy Professor in America
ipad
It's no secret that AIL Director Jon Taplin is a master at maximizing social media tools. We're happy to see that Online College, a web resource for online education, agrees. Jon is among 50 professors highlighted in the their 2011 list of the Social Media Savvy Professors in America.


 

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Welcome to our new lab!
ipad  AIL officially opened its doors to the USC community at an Open House event the afternoon of August 23, 2011. The event featured demos of the Lab's most recent and upcoming projects. Provost Elizabeth Garrett provided remarks to a full house in the Annenberg West Lobby. She noted the Lab's unique approach to working at the intersection of technological innovations and analytical work, leading to social change, new business models, ideas and understandings. Congratulations to Dean Wilson, Jonathan Taplin, Erin Reilly and the entire faculty and staff who have worked so hard to bring this lab to reality. See Daily Trojan coverage.

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Studios dance to the new Tweet beat
ipad  Variety's Peter Bart discusses the new algorithms driving film marketers... 
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A new metric for the summer box office: "Twitter heat."
ipad  USC launches Twitter movie box office predictor
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Introducing the Annenberg Film Forecaster
ipad  What's the buzz on big movies opening this summer? 
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R-Shief in the News!
ipad  Having just presented at The Access to Knowledge for Development Center's (A2K4D) second annual workshop at AUC's Tahrir Campus, AIL's Laila Shereen Sakr (aka VJ Um Amel) and R-Shief are generating a lot of interest....
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Forecasting the Summer Blockbusters
ipad  See AIL's Jonathan Taplin on Nightline, explaining how we're using IBM software to look at public sentiment regarding summer blockbuster movie releases! 
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Top Three Analytics Trends in the “Smarter Media” Industry
ipad  IBM's Building a Smarter Planet blog notes AIL's innovations in "Event-Driven Analytics"
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PLAY! @ RFK-LA!
ipad
Check out the great work done at the PLAY! after-school program this year at RFK-LA...

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Promising Ideas for Mobile News Apps
ipad  Read about four mobile news solutions developed for local news organizations by this year's News Idea Incubator Fellows. 
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MarketWatch: Looking at Twitter Sentiment to Predict Box Office
ipad  Facebook and Twitter experts expect “Hangover II” to blow away the competition this weekend. “Can it do $100 million?” Jonathan Taplin, director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC, asked rhetorically. “Yes, $100 million this weekend is easily doable.”
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Scholar tracks the tweets that changed the world
ipad  iMAP PhD candidate and Innovation Lab researcher Laila Shereen Sakr expects to see more uprisings in the Middle East. Her source? Twitter.
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John Seely Brown's Commencement Address, IIT
ipad  The Chairman of the Innovation Lab's Advisory Board had some inspirational words for this year's graduates at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
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MarketWatch: Will USC Annenberg be the next Silicon Valley?
ipad  Jon Friedman's Media Web profiles USC Annenberg and the Annenberg Innovation Lab under the leadership of Dean Ernest Wilson: Journalism + Innovation = Entrepreneurship.
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Annual Conference 2011: See With New Eyes
ipad  Check out the agenda, speakers and videos from our first annual conference, held April 1, 2011. Check back here as we continue to post more after the event!
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Innovation Lab Faculty Associate Henry Jenkins Named as one of the Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future
ipad  In the company of Tim Berners-Lee, Jimmy Wales, and Susan Crawford (among others), USC's own /Henry Jenkins has been named one of "the top ten minds whose ideas are helping to shape our future" by Prospect Magazine, who cite Jenkins as "perhaps the world’s most influential and radical scholar" addressing issues of culture and education in the digital world through Project New Media Literacies.
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Mobile Voices receives United Nations World Summit Award
ipad  Congratulations to François Bar and Sasha Costanza-Chock who have received one of the United Nations World Summit Awards for Mobile Content and Apps, in the "m-Inclusion & Empowerment" category!

From the press release (see Read More, below):
"While mobile telephony is a global network, the best content comes from producers developing very local content. India and US producers are winning 4 awards each in the 8 categories of the WSA-mobile. Russia and Germany score high in content quality with 3 winners each. More than 420 products from close to 100 UN member states were entered in the 2010 contest."

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