Ever settled in on your couch, flipped on the local news and started thinking that a robot could do that teleprompter-
reading stuff?

It can. And it is.

Not a robot exactly, but a well-instructed video game character. Northwestern University researchers have created a program that turns the alien-blasting character Alyx Vance from "Half-Life 2" into a news anchor. In their project, Vance is guided toward a news area — foreign events, say — and computers take over from there.

"Everything in there is automatic," says project leader Kristian Hammond, co-director of the university's intelligent information laboratory. "There's not a single moment, from the begining to the end, of human intervention."

The program scours the Web for an article that Alyx will read aloud on-screen through text-recognition technology that edits existing text for clarity, changing some passive verbs to active, for example. It then automatically inserts photos and video from related sites, along with a CBS News "Free Speech"-style segment that adds outside commentary from blogs, read aloud by a different "Half-Life" character.

In between the action, Alyx has been known to kill a newsroom-invading alien or two — an entertaining flourish designed by grad students who helped create the presentation.

The broadcast, dubbed "News at 7," is fully automated journalism. And though still in the experimental development stage, it isn't alone.

In March, Thomson Financial expanded its news service into regular corporate earnings stories, not by hiring more journalists but by contracting with San Francisco software company UpTick Data Technologies to create computer-generated news articles.

The program scans incoming SEC filings for specific data and, in about one-third of a second, spits out what can only be described as a news article. The articles are sent, without human intervention, to Thomson's customers, mostly large financial institutions that rely on speedy data to make their decisions. Bonus: No ink-stained wretches here; Thomson Financial director of content development Andrew Meagher says there are no typos, and the program hasn't made any major mistakes yet.

On average, the software produces 850 to 1,000 articles a day, which Meagher says will soon be used as a basis for follow-up stories by its living, breathing real-life reporters.

"It shouldn't put 'em out of a job," Meagher says of his company's 300-plus journalists. "But it should allow them to free their time from doing the drudgery. ... What we'd like the journalist to be focused on is the whys of the stories, not necessarily the whats."

UpTick partner Mike Iapalucci says the company considers its end product not automated journalism but "rules-based text generation." The six-year-old company has previously been producing financial reports that depend on personalization such as retirement plans.

"News is just another version of text or commentary for us," he said.

The company has been in talks with AOL in hopes of expanding into personalized news stories for fantasy sports leagues, he said. The vocabulary in the articles can be as wordy or as straightforward as the customer wants: "It's only limited by the creativity of the person seeding that application."

At Northwestern, Hammond and several grad students — funded for three years by a $430,000 grant from the National Science Foundation — are seeking to go beyond even that effort. They've run the program for "News at 7" hundreds of times in order to refine the rules, and recorded the end product on video a dozen times.

"My job is to create a completely believable simulation of human intelligence within the confines of this task," Hammond said. "If I'm successful then I will build a newscaster, someone that will find the news and be as good as any broadcast journalist."

Combined with the latest trends in journalism — user-generated content, major staff cutbacks in newsrooms, etc. — will "News at 7," Thomson and their ilk put flesh-and-blood reporters out of jobs?

"Anything in the world of information, the more intelligent our system becomes, we don't become superfluous by any means. In fact I think our skills are amplified a thousandfold," Hammond said.

Then again, in the world of technology, he said, "Everything puts everybody out of work, eventually."

___

Ryan Pearson is an asap staff reporter. For now.

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