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Q&A with Ubilab’s Eduardo Campos Pellanda: We like problems

In the run up to the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum, we’ve been talking to some of the experts who will be speaking in Torino in June. Eduardo Campos Pellanda is Director of the Ubilab at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), and helping to carry out research on Google Glass with the MIT Mobile Experience Lab.

by WAN-IFRA Staff executivenews@wan-ifra.org | April 14, 2014

WAN-IFRA: What are you currently working on at the Ubilab? 

Pellanda: I’m working together with Grupo RBS on new forms of capturing, process and delivery of journalism through different devices. We have two kinds of methodology: improve present products and research future scenarios. In the former we are trying to understand how wearables and different hardwares could lead to new opportunities.

What are your criteria for taking on a project? What are you looking to achieve when you begin?

We like problems. The company shows a reality and together we transform it through research. We have a multi-disciplinary approach in our research. So we try to select a project that has a focus on Media Communications but sometimes we need an explanation from other fields. So, this is the main focus on the selection.

Can you tell us about your work on geolocation, and what it might mean for the future of journalism

I’ve been working on this topic since 2002 for my PhD thesis. Since then I’ve been trying to understand how we connect information to places. In the beginning of the Internet, one of the main characteristics of this method of communication was that we didn’t have physical boundaries anymore. But this also led us to a enormous amount of data without any relation to the actual space. I started to wonder how we could understand what is happening around us in the city.

Pellanda will be speaking at the World Newspaper Congress/World Editors Forum/World Advertising Forum in Torino, Itally, during a session titled “Innovation: From idea to impact,” which takes place at 14:30 on Monday, 9 June.

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