Synthesized Publishing

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Design challenge:

Create an automated publishing platform for content creators and consumers that publishes and curates itself like a digital garden to reduce information overload.

The challenge can be approached from different perspectives and can be adjusted to the IT Area of interest of the student with an interest in:

HBO-i domains: Software Engineering, User Interaction
IT-Areas: AI engineering, web development (front-end/back-end), UX design

Context

The research group Interaction Design (IXD) is interested in the shape, matter, and power of our relationship with information. In particular, we see how humans struggle in the face of information overload:

  • Quantity of information (too much or not enough),
  • Quality of information (information density, ease of use of info),
  • Complexity or Simplicity of information (too much or too little).

This struggle is not new (Kierkegaard, 1840), but the technologies surrounding us are. Do those new technologies and the products built around them help us deal with information overload or do they only make things worse?

We (hereby) pose strategic design experiments for ideas, concepts, products, services, and environments with regards to new ways of information moderation, transformation, curation, and publishing by means of (generative) AI.

Part of the experiments is to critically look at the (potential) positive and negative impact of such technologies and ideas on democracy, healthcare, education, journalism, arts and cultural exchange, museums, (digital) publishing and others.

This critical view is essential because it is dubious whether new services such as generative AI are really making us more creative, more productive, smarter, happier, work better as a society.

Currently, we are pursuing projects that deal with:

  • enticing intellectual and creative pursuits
  • moderating info-overload instead of contributing
  • mediating people using virtual representatives

The Assignment

Problem

With the rise of generative AI, automatic publishing platforms will pop up everywhere. Such platforms will no doubt contribute to information overload by constantly generating new content without regard for quality, relevance, or redundancy. This leads to a fragmented information landscape where valuable insights are buried under repetitive or low-value posts. Can we apply the techniques of automated publishing to let substance win over content, meaning quality of quantity?

Instead of seeing an automated publishing platform as a content generating machine to continuously grab the attention of users with minimal effort and news and potentially false information, we invite you to envision an automated publishing platform that treats its content as tending to a digital garden. Can such a platform be a rewarding base to return to for users with an interest in a particular topic?

Assignment

Develop an automated publishing platform that synthesizes, curates, and refines information to create a dynamic and coherent knowledge base. The platform could:

Aggregate content automatically from various input sources, such as RSS feeds, blogs, or news sites. Then, it could identify its relation to a particular topic or target audience and be able to create automated posts. Instead of continuously creating new posts, it could refine old posts, or even remove old posts, based on new information. The system could become a digital garden, constantly tended to ensure the information remains relevant and accurate, just like Wikipedia pages are maintained by its user community. You can also explore adding user interaction to refine the platform's curation process and explore how for instance visuals can be generated for the post.

Research opportunities

  • Setting up an automated publishing platform using static site generators
  • Investigate techniques for automated content generation and curation using modern LLM tools and frameworks
  • Explore the impact of continuous content refinement on information quality and user satisfaction.
  • Study user interaction patterns with synthesized content and their contributions to the refinement process.
  • As with all projects, we invite you to think critically of the possible impact of anything you create.

Expected outcome

Depending on the experience and interest of the student, we envision:

  • a system that uses CI/CD and static site generators to be a constantly updated online presence

  • AI-assisted system to read, generate, and curate old and new posts from incoming information streams

  • a template, or blueprint, or tutorial on how to set up such a system for a given topic and target audience

Guidance

The DPBTSE (The Dead Philosophers Brainstorm To Solve Everything) is part of the research group Interaction Design (IXD) of Fontys ICT. The DPBTSE is a combination of a thinktank and a creative lab for the research group interested in working with the combination of applied:

  • Sciences,
  • Arts (and design),
  • Creativity and Philosophy, to create innovative interactive concepts, products, services and experiments.

The project is open ended, meaning we will adapt and respond to interesting intermediate results more than setting a clear target. We need adventurous students that are willing to get engaged with the available researchers, leading to a potentially very rewarding internship.

Your contacts are:

  • Olaf Janssen, PhD in computational physics, experience in mobile app development, web develoment and design, AI and LLM, game design and development.

  • John van Litsenburg, teacher and developer of UXD / IXD strategy, concepts, product and services development and 2d / 3d design and of societal impact of artificial intelligence. Work and worked for Media design, Smart Mobile, Artificial intelligence.

Feel free to contact with any question about the internship assignment.