Trendify: High-tech innovation  with a focus on predicting emerging news trends and the associated opinions and trending content

Overall goal and expected impact

What if journalists had better access to and could delve deeper into (the latest) news topics and examine the underside of the news? This is precisely what Trendify aims to achieve. Technological innovation that maximises the editorial context with a minimum of research time. With the potential to offer  more relevant information.

Today, media face the challenge of writing high-quality, distinctive pieces taken from the ever-quickening media and information flow. The innovation objective of Trendify is to provide a collection of AI tools for media monitoring that can help to be both more creative and more efficient. This will enable journalists to discover surprising perspectives and opinions, thereby further improving the quality of the content and reducing research time.

These tools will consist of a trend detection engine (detecting time-bound changes in the themes or topics), an opinion mining engine (bringing to light opinions related to these trends) and a trending content detection engine (finding content that generates a lot of user interaction over a short period of time).

These research results will introduce cost-efficient and innovative tools to facilitate the offering of high quality content.

 
Effective collaboration

To realise this project, the Roularta Innovation Lab is entering into partnerships with ML2Grow (AI service provider), YestItCan.be (technology provider) and research groups VUB-SMIT and VUB-AILab, forming a triple helix of cooperation between government, companies and education, enabling technologically progressive solutions.

This imec.icon project proposal (call 2019-2) was approved by Flanders Innovation and Entrepreneurship on 7 February 2020 and will run for a period of 2 years starting on 1 April 2020.