The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

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By John Glenday, Reporter

November 8, 2016 | 2 min read

ITV has joined forces with Havas ahead of today’s monumental US presidential election by building a custom artificial intelligence platform to help gauge the mood of Americans before official results start to pour in.

EagleAi is claimed to be the first AI system to be developed for television news and will sift through a morass of unstructured data generated by the ugly election campaign to glean insights which human observers may have missed.

Trawling millions of social media posts, photos, videos, comments, searches and press coverage generated since the day Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were named as their respective party nominees in the race to the White House the system will seek to identify and understand language, sentiment, imagery, personality, tone and confidence in the material it devours.

Explaining how this software will go about its business Havas London’s executive digital director Lisa De Bonis said: “EagleAi works a lot like a human brain actually, but on a scale that our brains are not currently able to do. It can spot connections and patterns just like us, just on a truly massive scale.”

It is the first time AI is said to have been used in this way at such scale although the technology has already come into play for news delivery by the likes of the Washington Post which uses automated systems to deliver data-centric news.

To help viewers interpret the silicon analysis De Bonis will be on hand with ITV’s Tom Bradby and a panel of expert guests from 10:40pm tonight to give a more traditional flesh and blood account of proceedings.

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