News at Seven is a fully automated approach to creating broadcast news developed at Northwestern University's Intelligent Information Laboratory (InfoLab.) Starting with a set of user preferences, the system finds and edits relevant stories for broadcast presentation, uncovers relevant background visual materials (e.g., videos and still images), and augments the primary text using sources such as blogs found on the Web. Together, these resources are then used to drive a set of animated characters who reside in a virtual "news world" we have created for them. The result is a short Flash video that can be broadcast or deployed on the web. News at Seven isn't just the future, it's the future of the future!
