Plans are underway to let Northeastern University students this fall get immediate answers to pressing questions about their enrollment status and reminders about important school tasks — all through a customized application loaded onto an Amazon Echo Dot.

Created by a team of researchers from the Barabási Lab at Northeastern University and IBM’s Visual AI Lab, WonderNet transforms databases into data sculptures, all of which take different forms based on the underlying structure of the data. 

Starting this fall, some students at Northeastern University in Boston will be given the option of getting an Echo Dot smart speaker linked to their university accounts. They’ll be able to ask Amazon’s Alexa what time their classes are, how much money’s left on their food card and even how much they owe the bursar’s […]

As a new report, Funding the News, by Matthew Nisbet and his colleagues—co-published by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy and the School of Journalism at Northeastern University—makes clear, while nonprofit journalism is rising, commercial journalism is declining at a precipitous rate.

The report, “Funding the News,” by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy and Northeastern University, focuses mainly on the largest flows of foundation funding for media, documenting support to public radio and national news nonprofits like ProPublica. But it also looks at funding for 25 magazines and journals over a six-year period, […]

Northeastern University will offer its students this fall the option of receiving an Echo Dot customized to handle basic questions about student life at the Boston-based school.

“Is the practice of giving out soon-to-be expired drugs ethical? The answer is clearly no,” said Leo Beletsky, an associate professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University in Boston. “People who receive medication [from a charity program] deserve the same quality as anybody else. There should be the same standards for products sold […]

In this op-ed, Liz Bucar, an associate professor of religion at Northeastern University, and author and writer Amanda Randone explain how Believers Bail Out, a Muslim-run grassroots organization, is helping raise awareness about incarceration during Ramadan.

“You can’t get people excited about gun control because there’s a domestic homicide, an isolated case somewhere in America,” said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University. “You can’t even get them excited because there are 45 of them a day.”

I’d just lazily plopped myself onto the family room sofa and was scrolling through email on my phone. CNN was playing in the background as commentators issued observations about whatever newsy thing the president had done or said in the past few hours. That’s when I saw it. The email from my son’s high school […]

Neither the Obama administration then or the Trump administration now has avoided intruding into the important newsgathering role of the press, but it’s a big mistake to equate the two. Attacking the press is pervasive with Trump. Obama practices were situational. Trump is playing his “nobody can criticize me” card. Wrong as his judgment may […]

Academic research around disinformation isn’t new, but our empirical understanding of how to cope with the tactic remains limited. Northeastern University’s Briony Swire-Thompson researches the cognitive psychology behind disinformation effectiveness. “It is important to let the public know as soon as possible where the information comes from,” she explained. “This is because when deciding on […]