GroundSource, a community engagement platform, will build chat bots for news delivery and crowdsourcing. Andrew Haeg, project leader and GroundSource founder, will work with natural language processing researchers to develop naturalistic interactions, research open source bot frameworks, and measure whether two-way, conversational news leads to higher levels of engagement.

Alejandro González, development and innovation director for 14ymedio, will work on low-bandwidth technology to amplify the distribution of the news organization’s content in Cuba. The project will also develop revenue streams that directly leverage users instead of third-party advertisers.

Dr. Michelle Barrett Ferrier, founder of Troll-Busters.com and an associate professor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University will create and test a hybrid accelerator model to support student-professional media startups for underserved and underrepresented communities. She will also build a platform for collaboration among historically black higher education institutions with graduate programs in media and journalism entrepreneurship.

Mike Wheeler, managing partner of Westerly Partners, and David Danto, director of emerging technologies for Interactive Multimedia and Collaborative Communications Alliance, will design and test new low-cost, scalable video recording and archiving systems based on emerging technologies for public community meetings and events. By lowering the cost and complexity, they intend for their solutions to become an essential part of community journalism.

As journalism continues to explore new ways to engage and define its audience, a natural place to look for innovation and insight is the world of visual arts. Anne Thompson, an adjunct assistant professor in the University of Missouri’s Art Department, conducted “news-art” experiments and continued her nationally recognized “I-70 Sign Show” billboard project as an RJI Fellow.

In an effort to boost participation of women in online community forums on news websites, a New York Times team will conduct gender-inclusive analysis and engineering design and product-testing protocols as part of the Coral Project. That project is an open-source comment system being developed by the Times, The Washington Post and the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project. Project leader: Marie Tessier, lead moderator of reader comment to The New York Times opinion pages and a blog contributor.

Harsh Taneja, an assistant professor of strategic communications at the Missouri School of Journalism, will conduct research using social network analysis on the role of news websites in people’s online lives. This “user behavior analysis” will focus on the makeup of the clusters of online destinations that people regularly visit. Are news sites a central part of this routine? Can these clusters give us helpful information about how non-news sites can help improve metrics on news sites?

During a fellowship, Missouri Press Service launched a suite of digital services designed to help community newspaper publishers boost their relationships with ad clients while generating additional revenue. Services range from creating websites and social media pages for newspapers’ ad clients to training newspaper staffs to sell targeted YouTube and display ads.

Victor Hernandez will devote eight months to exploring the impact of wearable technology on newsrooms as a 2015-2016 nonresidential fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. His research is intended to lay a foundation for future testing and experimentation. Hernandez plans to partner with local and national news organizations to experiment with the technology and study potential journalistic applications.

Brian Hensel, an instructor in the University of Missouri’s Department of Health Management and Informatics, will explore the opportunities for journalism to help the health care industry, which has been accelerating efforts to use storytelling to improve performance and help patients stay healthy. His doctorate degree in journalism and his experience as a health care executive will position him to explore interesting collaborations and potential new revenue sources.