Anadolu showcases its innovative technology projects at international media event

By Anadolu staff

BERLIN (AA) - Anadolu showcased its innovative technologies and artificial intelligence projects at an international media conference in Berlin on Friday.

President and CEO of Anadolu Serdar Karagoz, and Director of Marketing and Business Development Erman Yuksel attended the 37th MINDS International conference, which brought together the world’s leading news agencies.

In his presentation, Yuksel highlighted the growing importance of digitalization and artificial intelligence for news agencies, and said Anadolu has started to significantly invest in the production of new technologies.

“As Anadolu, our aim is to become a technology hub, technology producer. We have developed an advanced reporter drone, we are working on various AI-supported application projects. We are using them for our news production, and our goal is to sell these products and services in future,” he said.

Yuksel presented the advanced “reporter drone” produced by Anadolu, which was first unveiled at TEKNOFEST aerospace and technology festival in southern Adana province last week.

The drone, which has a dual camera feature, offers users the opportunity to produce live broadcasts. It was designed at a lower cost than other products in its class.

Yuksel also presented results of Anadolu’s latest hackathon event, the development of innovative technological solutions and artificial intelligence applications such as “Deepmind,” which adds multilingual subtitles to videos with AI support.

The 37th MINDS International conference was hosted by German press agency DPA, and brought together CEOs, managers and senior executives of the news agencies.

Wolfgang Nedomansky, managing director of the MINDS International, said this year’s meeting has been an important opportunity for news agencies to share their projects, experiences and best practices.

“It's about sharing. It's about exchanging, licensing things to each other, developing things together. There are a lot of collaborative projects that we're running, where agencies are developing CMS together, for example,” he told Anadolu.

“Most of the agencies produce solutions, develop new innovations for a national market, which has limited potential. We do not need to reinvent the wheel in each of the countries,” he said, adding that cooperation among news agencies help in reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

Kimmo Laaksonen, the chair of MINDS Board, said this year’s conference has focused on common challenges faced by the news agencies, such as IT security, digitalization and the artificial intelligence.

“If you look how fast artificial intelligence is developing, nobody really know where we will be within the 10 years, 20 years. So it's interesting, and at the same time it's a bit scary,” he told Anadolu.

Laaksonen, who is also the CEO of the Finnish news agency STT, said while artificial intelligence poses significant challenges for news agencies, it also offers new opportunities.

He pointed out that artificial intelligence will increase speed and efficiency of news production, but for many experts it is unlikely to completely replace journalists.

“We will still need journalists, we will still need human beings who will actually make decisions to ensure that what we are producing is reliable, it's trustworthy, and it's also truthful,” he stressed.