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Towards Responsible AI for Local Journalism
We hereby invite you to a talk by Dr. Reshmi Pillai, Vrije University, Amsterdam, on responsible AI for local journalism where she presents an ongoing research project. The studies include a graph-based retrieval augmented generation for news background information, text simplification of news reports, usage of LLM personas for news feedback for journalists.
About Reshmi Pillai:
Dr Reshmi Pillai is a Post-doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Communication Science at the Vrije University Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in the project “Towards Responsible AI for Local Journalism”. Earlier, she was a Lecturer (Docent 4) in the Masters’ Information Studies program in the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam (2019-2023). In 2021, she was awarded Ph.D. for her thesis titled “Expressions of psychological stress on twitter: detection and characterisation”, from the University of Wolverhampton, UK.
In her research, Reshmi explores human-centred AI applications to support societally embedded workflows and challenges—particularly in journalism. Collaborating with a Dutch news media organization, she led design thinking sessions to identify practical challenges in newsroom settings. This led to several applied projects grounded in Natural Language Processing including: a graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation system that provides contextual background to journalists from sources like Wikipedia and news archives, experimental prompting strategies for rewriting news headlines on social media in varied linguistic styles, the development of LLM-based news reader personas to explore cultural inclusivity and evaluations of text simplification models to assess their treatment of stylistic and rhetorical devices.