Helen Gynell – COMPUTATION+JOURNALISM 2025 Symposium

C+J Symposium 2025—Day Two Workshop 5 | Robert Simmon

Robert Simmon, Cartographer + Science Communicator specializing in Visualizing Satellite Imagery
Workshop Title: Data Mapping like a Pro: Raster Maps with command-line tools
Robert Simmon, Cartographer + Science Communicator specializing in Visualizing Satellite Imagery
Workshop Title: Data Mapping like a Pro: Raster Maps with command-line tools

Robert Simmon is a cartographer and science communicator who specializes in visualizing satellite data. He has decades of experience working with remote sensing experts and entrepreneurs, helping share their research and products with the public. Along the way he’s designed some of the most widely viewed imagery of our home planet. His work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, and web sites; including the front page of the New York Times and the cover of National Geographic. He’s also known for creating the first global view of the Earth at Night, crafting the Blue Marble featured on the original Apple iPhone, and writing about best practices for scientific visualization.

WORKSHOP TITLE: Data Mapping like a Pro: Raster Maps with command-line tools

Raster data is a powerful tool for telling stories about both the natural world and human conflicts. Unfortunately, working with this data is often difficult and time consuming. In this workshop you’ll use command-line tools like GDAL and Python to read and manipulate raster data formats, and learn the fundamentals necessary to explore new data on your own. These techniques can help you make better and more innovative maps, faster.

C+J Symposium 2025—Day Two Workshop 4 | Rui Barrios

Rui Barros, Data Journalist, PUBLICO
Workshop Title: AI Agents: License to Do Journalism

Rui Barros is a data journalist at PÚBLICO, Portugal, where he works on data-driven investigations and interactive storytelling. His work includes cross-border investigative projects examining government accountability and political financing across Europe, collaborating with international newsrooms to make complex data accessible to broad
audiences.

Rui teaches data journalism and web development at Universidade Lusófona and leads workshops at conferences across Europe, focusing on emerging approaches that combine traditional investigative rigor with new technical possibilities—from interactive narratives to AI-assisted research workflows. His work has been recognized with Sigma Awards nominations and the Data Journalism Award from the Portuguese Statistical Society.

WORKSHOP TITLE: AI Agents: License to Do Journalism
Learn to build sophisticated AI agents that handle complex investigative research, cross-reference datasets automatically, and fact-check claims in real-time. This hands-on workshop introduces six proven agent architectures—Prompt Chaining, Routing, Parallelization, and Orchestrator-Workers—that solve real newsroom challenges.

Participants will build practical “AI recipes” to extract and verify statistics from documents, cross-reference claims across databases, route breaking news intelligently, and orchestrate fact-checking workflows with human oversight. Each pattern includes working code, ethical considerations, and integration strategies for existing newsroom tools.

No advanced programming required—just curiosity about how AI can augment journalistic judgment and rigor.

C+J Symposium 2025—Day Two Paper Presentations

C+J Symposium 2025—Day One Lightning Talk | Alyssa Fowers

Alyssa Fowers, Graphics Reporter | The Washington Post
Lightning Talk Title: How to build a dataset (a silly example for a serious topic)

Alyssa Fowers is a graphics and data reporter at The Washington Post who covers the economy and (on a good day) dogs. Before joining The Post in 2020, she studied at the University of Miami’s Interactive Media program.

LIGHTNING TALK TITLE: How to build a dataset (a silly example for a serious topic)

When your dataset doesn’t exist—or exists in fragments across many different sources—sometimes you have to build it yourself. This talk uses the unofficial holiday dataset from The Washington Post’s Department of Data as a humorous example to help think through the issues inherent to building any dataset: where the information comes from, whether to err on the side of over- or under-inclusion, how to evaluate your sources, how to automate (ish) deduplication, when to make judgment calls, how to build a rating scale, and more. By the end of the talk, the audience will understand how we know that the least-real holiday during C+J is the Festival of Unmentionable Thoughts, and how to apply that knowledge in more-substantive settings.

December 11, 2025 | Newman Alumni Center, University of Miami

C+J Symposium—Day One AI in Journalism PANEL

Computation + Journalism Symposium 2025 Day One AI in Journalism PANEL • David Chivers, Meg Heckman, Bahareh Heravi, Duy Nguyen, and MODERATOR: Jeremy Gilbert | University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL | December 11+12, Newman Alumni Center, 6200 San Amaro Drive | Conference Host: Alberto Cairo, PhD

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Helen Gynell

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C+J Symposium 2025—Day One Workshop 1

Computation + Journalism Symposium Day One Workshop 1: Andres Snitcofsky "Embodying Data—Storytelling Under Autocracy" | University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL | December 11+12, Newman Alumni Center, 6200 San Amaro Drive | Conference Host: Alberto Cairo, PhD

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