Scaling up with STADIEM
2021 was an exciting year for us. Our vision for a new kind of media technology resonated with the STADIEM jury and we were thrilled to join the program. STADIEM provided a perfect foundation: the support of fellow founders and generous funding from the EU. This allowed us to focus on developing new ideas together with a great corporate partner.
Power to the Pictures
Image Display Control (IDC) allows images to adapt to any container or screen, no matter where they are displayed. IDC combines human touch with a unique AI specially developed for creative decisions. Or as we like to say — Power to The Pictures.
Developing IDC technology was the goal of the STADIEM project T&T: Trust and Transparency. To achieve our goal we partnered with one of Germany’s leading media companies, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). Together, we fine-tune IDC to fit FAZ’s editorial needs.
Understanding the needs of various stakeholders at FAZ was key to our cooperation in the Develop phase. IDC benefits tech and editorial teams in different ways. We wanted to understand how Frameright can serve both. After running several experiments with the Frameright AI and improving our integration API we are well prepared for the next phase — Integrate.
Better AI through better datasets
Why did we choose Trust and Transparency as our STADIEM topic? Well, the answer is simple: awareness and responsibility. We need greater awareness of what is included in the datasets used for Machine Learning models. Whatever is left out of the dataset is also left out of the model. The result — biased AI.
Here’s an example. In late 2021 Twitter stopped using its own AI after it was clearly biased. But it’s not always the AI making bad decisions. In 2020 Ugandan Climate activist Vanessa Nakate was cropped out of a group photo. That was a human decision. This is why we need to make sure there are tools for transparent workflows for news production with or without AI. Frameright enables both: the speed of AI with the precision of human input.
We’re looking forward to the Integrate phase and seeing our tech in action at the hands of FAZ. Working together we can make the technology and visual journalism even better. Agile principles all the way.
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STADIEM stands for Startup Driven innovation in European Media. It is an EU-funded piloting and acceleration program that brings together start-ups, scale-ups, investors, and media organizations to foster the development of Next Generation Media solutions.
In other words, consisting of four innovation hubs — Media City Bergen in Norway, Next Media Accelerator in Germany, Storytek in Estonia and VRT in Belgium — it is a European support network for taking innovative technologies to market.
Their 2nd call CLOSES ON 28TH FEBRUARY 2022 (17:00 CET)
The project has indirectly received funding from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme through the STADIEM project (Grant Agreement 957321)
