2025 Brown Institute Showcase
Maneesh Agrawala and Mark Hansen cordially invite you to the Brown Institute for Media Innovation's Annual Showcase of the Magic Grant Projects!
Join us for a reception starting at 5:00pm on October 22, 2025 at the Simonyi Conference Center, located on the 4th floor of CoDa Building, on the Stanford campus.
The event features a mix of engineers, technologists, journalists and media producers, all funded through the 2024-25 Magic Grant program.
alphaXiv, led by students at Stanford, has created a discussion platform layered directly on top of arXiv's 2.4 million academic papers — breaking down barriers between curious students and distinguished researchers by enabling real-time Q&A and collaboration on cutting-edge research.
Another team from Columbia University, Improper Conduct, has utilized large language models to build the first-of-its-kind public database tracking prosecutorial misconduct during criminal trials. Their pilot in Ohio has already identified patterns of improper and at times illegal behavior, and they’re working to incorporate AI tools that can help watchdog journalists expose judicial abuses nationwide.
Measuring Silence on Social Media, a project led by students at Stanford, is conducting a broad census of what perspectives are systematically under- or over-represented across online communities. Using a novel human + AI pipeline that leverages large language models and survey methods, they're quantifying the silencing effect to reveal whose voices go unheard in digital spaces.
And Justice Delayed, an investigative project from Columbia, is addressing India's staggering backlog of nearly 50 million court cases, cataloging long-pending criminal cases across 650+ district courts to equip journalists in remote regions with tools to scrutinize every aspect of their local criminal justice systems.
Read about the entire cohort projects presenting at the 2025 showcase event.
We hope you can join us!
Established in 2012, the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute is a collaboration between Columbia University and Stanford University, designed to encourage and support new endeavors in media innovation. At Stanford, the primary focus is on media technology, and the Institute is anchored in the School of Engineering. At Columbia, the primary focus is on content, and the Institute is anchored in the Graduate School of Journalism.