Course 5: Technology, innovation and metrics (10/02 – 12/02)

“For every technological trend we discuss in this training course, we more specifically focus on examples within the media domain and reflect upon the influence on media economics.”

Course 5: Trending technologies, blockchain and Media Economics

For those that are following the full program, course 5 is elective.

You can also join for only this course, Because of Covid-19 we have adapted the format in order to enable distance teaching so that all students, taking travel restrictions or personal quarantines into account, can fully take part. This means that this course will be completely online and consist of three one-hour lectures per day.

Click here for more details on designing your own programme.

Businesses, also media businesses, are highly driven by technological trends. Being able to imagine the potential changes due to these new technologies makes it possible for media professionals to still influence the technology in the direction they prefer, to be prepared to start adopting the technology, to invent a new business ecosystem, to create new business models for future new applications of these technologies in the media domain.

This training sheds light on the interplay between upcoming technological evolutions and their(possible) impact on the media industry and their economics. As the media industry takes time to catch up with technological innovations, being informed about trending technologies is important to imagine the future. More profound insights on phenomena like AI, distributed systems, internet-of-things, virtual and augmented reality and distributed systems as blockchain are discussed and innovators in the media and telecom domain present their experiences. This course focuses upon a better understanding of underlying technological building blocks which is needed to imagine the future media landscape and its economics.

Key Objectives

• Acquire knowledge of recent and upcoming technological evolutions that might impact the media industry.
• Acquire knowledge on phenomena like big data, internet-of-things, virtual and augmented reality, distributed systems like blockchain and their underlying technological building blocks.
• Provide insights and best practices on how these technologies are today already implemented in the media industry.
• Adopt innovation as a mindset in day-to-day operations.

Cases and Topics

• Network architecture
• Data ecosystems
• Distributed system
• Artificial intelligence
• Virtual reality & Augmented reality
• 5G
• Internet-of-Things
• Citizen Science
• Voice Virtual AssistantsTech trends impacting media economics
• Intellectual property

The course curator

Prof. dr Ike Picone

Ike Picone is professor of Media and Journalism Studies at VUB and head of the unit on Journalism, Trust and Participation at SMIT. His research focusses on developments in digital news. He is the Belgian partner of the Digital News Report, a yearly international survey on news use and a member of the Flemish Council for Journalism. After starting his research career on the project Flemish E-Publishing Trends in 2006, Ike kept a keen interest in the challenges the news industry is confronted with because of digital disruption. From Web 2.0 over Big Data and now AI, the news sector is in a constant state of flux and remains a mighty interesting field to see media economics at work. He enjoys a glass of fine whiskey once in a while.