Dr Bahareh Heravi
Academic and research departments
Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.About
Biography
Dr Bahareh Heravi is a Reader in AI and Media at the Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI. Her research is primarily focused on Data & Computational Journalism, data storytelling, data visualisation, and the use of AI in journalism and media.
Bahareh is a founding co-chair of the European Data & Computational Journalism Conference, and a steering committee member of the Computation + Journalism Conference. She sits on the Irish Government's Open Data Governance Board, and serve on the editorial board of the Digital Journalism journal.
Bahareh acts as an expert evaluator and a project monitor for the European Commission and the Research Data Alliance on a regular basis.
Prior to joining the University of Surrey, Bahareh was at University College Dublin (UCD) and served as a working group member of the Irish National Open Research Forum. At UCD she was the Postgraduate Director of the School of Information & Communication Studies, the founding director of UCD Data Journalism Programme, a member of the Graduate School Board at the College of Social Sciences and Law, and a member of the central Application Steering Group. She also sat on the Academic Oversight Committee of the UCD Professional Academy and was a member of the Race and Ethnic Equality working group at UCD EDI.
Previous to that Bahareh was a Research Group Leader at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at the National University of Ireland Galway, where she founded the Insight News Lab (a.k.a Digital Humanities and Journalism research group) and led a number of R&D projects in collaboration with industry partners such as RTÉ (Irish national TV and Radio Broadcaster). During 2014 and 2015 she worked as the Lead Data Scientist at the Irish Times and co-founded the Irish Times Data section.
Prior to her academic work, Bahareh worked over 10 years in the industry, designing, developing and managing Information Systems in various small, medium and large organisations in different sectors. She co-founded a successful software development company when she was 19 and sold her shares nearly 10 years later in 2010.
Dr Heravi was selected as one of Silicon Republic's Sci-Tech 100, and was named one of "22 high-flying scientists making the world a better place" in 2019.
You can follow her on Twitter on @Bahareh360.
News
I have an opening for a fully-funded PhD student in the area of AI and Journalism. Please get in touch if interested. Application deadline: 15 May 2022.
There is a second PhD studentship in People-centred multimodal perception, where I am the second supervisor. Application deadline: 30 April 2022.
Areas of specialism
News
In the media
Publications
Reviewing the existing and long-established storytelling structures, this paper examines the use of the storytelling structures employed in data storytelling, specifically in the context of data journalism. For this, a large set of data stories from a variety of news outlets was collected, tagged and analysed. Accordingly, and reflecting on the results, the paper proposes a new storytelling structure for data storytelling, which addresses the unique requirements of this emerging area of study and practice, called the Water Tower structure. This proposed structure is an addition to the existing storytelling structures, and is specifically designed for and targeted at storytelling with data, with a particular focus on data journalism. While this paper is primarily focused on data storytelling in journalism, the contributions are believed to be of use and value to other domains such as Business.