I don’t think I have ever re-posted a job ad but this one merits wide distribution:
We need two Java or Scala ninjas to build the core analytics and visualization components of Overview, and lead the open-source development community. You’ll work in the newsroom at AP’s global headquarters in New York, which will give you plenty of exposure to the very real problems of large document sets.
The exact responsibilities will depend on who we hire, but we imagine that one of these positions will be more focused on user experience and process design, while the other will do the computer science heavy lifting — though both must be strong, productive software engineers. Core algorithms must run on a distributed cluster, and scale to millions of documents. Visualization will be through high-performance OpenGL. And it all has to be simple and obvious for a reporter on deadline who has no time to fight technology. You will be expected to implement complex algorithms from academic references, and expand prototype techniques into a production application.
From the about page:
Overview is an open-source tool to help journalists find stories in large amounts of data, by cleaning, visualizing and interactively exploring large document and data sets. Whether from government transparency initiatives, leaks or Freedom of Information requests, journalists are drowning in more documents than they can ever hope to read.
There are good tools for searching within large document sets for names and keywords, but that doesn’t help find stories we’re not looking for. Overview will display relationships among topics, people, places and dates to help journalists to answer the question, “What’s in there?”
We’re building an interactive system where computers do the visualization, while a human guides the exploration. We will also produce documentation and training to help people learn how to use this system. The goal is to make this capability available to anyone who needs it.
Overview is a project of The Associated Press, supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of its Knight News Challenge. The Associated Press invests its resources to advance the news industry, delivering fast, unbiased news from every corner of the world to all media platforms and formats. The Knight News Challenge is an international contest to fund digital news experiments that use technology to inform and engage communities.
Sounds like a project that is worth supporting to me!
Analytics are great, but subject identity would be more useful.
Apply if you have the skill sets, repost the link, and/or volunteer to carry the good news of topic maps to the project.
[…] The Overview project posted the first job ad that I ever posted to this blog: Overview: Visualization to Connect the Dots. […]
Pingback by Step-by-step instructions for using Overview « Another Word For It — December 14, 2013 @ 8:06 pm