Stanford Engineering and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism announce Magic Grants to transform the world of media
Grants will fund eight groups of students, faculty and post-docs to develop media technologies that could transform how stories are discovered and told.
The David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation has awarded its 2014-2015 Magic Grants to eight teams of students, faculty, alumni and post-doctoral researchers from Columbia and Stanford universities to develop new technologies that could transform the way media content is produced, delivered and consumed.
Offered annually, Magic Grants are made possible by a gift from longtime Cosmopolitan magazine editor and author Helen Gurley Brown, who established the Brown Institute as a partnership between Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University’s School of Engineering.
The winning projects include a mobile-based, augmented reality tool to expand the stories that museum curators can tell about works of art in their collections, a data-mining platform to reverse engineer ad-server algorithms, and a documentary, filmed with immersive video technology, that profiles 40 Iranian artists living both in and out of Iran.
David and Helen Gurley Brown believed that magic happens when innovative technology is combined with great content and talented people are given the opportunity to explore their visions of the future. The Brown Institute sponsors thinking, building and speculating about how stories are discovered and told in a networked, digitized world.
The following is a complete list of Magic Grants funded by the Brown Institute for 2014-2015:
Art++: Meaning Augmenting Art with Technology, Art++ aims to improve the experience of visitors in a museum gallery by proposing a new way of delivering information to them. Using augmented reality, Art++ will offer viewers an immersive and interactive learning experience by overlaying content directly on the objects through the viewfinder of a smartphone or tablet device. The Art++ team consists of Jean-Baptiste Boin, a PhD candidate in electrical engineering at Stanford, and Colleen Stockmann, assistant curator for special projects at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford.
