Organisation Profile
Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a global news agency, delivering fast, accurate, in-depth coverage of the events shaping our world from wars and conflicts to politics, sports, entertainment and the latest breakthroughs in health, science and technology. With 2,900 staff and stringers of 80 nationalities, spread across 165 countries, AFP covers the world 24 hours a day in six languages, delivering the news in video, text, pictures, multimedia and graphics. AFP produces roughly 5.000 text dispatches, 3.000 photos, 100 graphics and 200 videos per day in six languages (French, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic). AFP’s photo database contains more than 30 million pictures.
AFP participates in R&D projects through its Medialab unit, which is a small transdisciplinary team (engineers and journalists) dedicated to research and development and aimed at bringing innovation to the company.
In recent years, AFP Medialab has participated in the European projects Papyrus (Digital Libraries), Glocal (organizing media through events) and InVID (social media video verification), as well as seven French R&D projects in Semantic web technologies, knowledge extraction, speech to text, multimedia visualization and interactive video.
User centric design and design thinking methodologies are used by AFP Medialab to develop efficient tools responding to the needs of professional journalists.
Role in the Project:
As a world-renown news agency, AFP is a user partner of WeVerify, aiming to use the technologies developed in the project in its future operations. AFP Medialab will participate in the gathering of user requirements, will test and evaluate the developed technologies and will exploit those technologies for its newsroom. Some co-development is also foreseen, including an active role in use case work, dissemination and exploitation.