The process of automatically spotting breaking news events is relatively straightforward. It is based on the idea that if something important is happening now, Wikipedia editors working in different languages will update the relevant pages at the same time.
Wikipedia and its sister site Wikidata publish all edits using the Wikimedia IRC server. This allows all interested parties to monitor edits as they happen. An algorithm by Thomas Steiner at Google Germany simply monitors this feed looking for the simultaneous activity that is the signature of breaking news.
He called this application the Wikipedia Live Monitor and released it last year and it has successfully identified numerous breaking news stories, such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the more recent loss of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
<p.Now Steiner has added a visual element to this process. This is based on another application that he and others have developed that searches social media for images associated with a particular search term. It then extracts any visual media, removes duplicates and then crops the images so that they fit together in a grid. He calls this application Social Media Illustrator.
via The Evolution of Automated Breaking News Stories | MIT Technology Review
