McCormick Start-Up Featured in BusinessWeek

Stats Monkey, a software program that automatically generates sports stories using commonly available information such as box scores and play-by-plays, started as a collaboration between the McCormick School of Engineering and the Medill School of Journalism.

Now, the professors who helped create the program — Kris Hammond, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and Larry Birnbaum, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science — have created a company to commercialize it.

The company, Narrative Science, specializes in machine-generated content. "There's no human author and no human editing," Stuart Frankel, 44, the company's CEO and a former executive at DoubleClick told BusinessWeek magazine. "But the stories sound really good." Click here to read the article.

Narrative Science licenses the software from Northwestern University. To create the software, Hammond and Birnbaum and students working in McCormick's Intelligent Information Lab created algorithms that use statistics from a game to write text that captures the overall dynamic of the game and highlights the key plays and players. Along with the text is an appropriate headline and a photo of what the program deems as the most important player in the game.

For more info: InfoLab web site.