Possible final projects for 2018 class, Columbia Journalism School. Full syllabus and lecture videos at http://www.compjournalism.com/?p=218

1. Potential Final Projects
Reporting
• The code behind capitalism
Research
• Human vs. machine risk scores
Software
• Entity recognition, machine learning for Overview

2. The Code Behind Capitalism

3. The Scope of Automated Trading
How much trading is done by machine now? By whom? And how? How do
these systems respond to disinformation and anomalies?

4. An economy shaped by algorithmic investors
What types of economic activity do classic trading algorithms
encourage/discourage? Perhaps start with the Quantopian algorithm library.

5. Computational Journalism Tools

6. Overview could use an update to its entity extractor, to add parsing-based
recognition (ala NLTK or Spacy) to its current pattern matching (company names)
and dictionary (place names) approaches. This would allow it to find person names,

7. It would not be hard to build machine learning into an Overview plugin. There is
already tagging, but no codeto actually build and run the model.

8. Comparing human and machine
risk assessment in bail reform

9. Human Decisions and Machine Predictions, Kleinberg et. al. 2017

10. Platform reverse-engineering

11. How Anyone Can Audit Facebook’s NewsFeed, J. Nathan Matias