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At the beginning of a New York Times article online, Explains frequently asked questions about Covid-19 vaccines, readers can write any query that comes to mind. “Am I eligible?” “Can I take Tylenol before I get vaccinated?” “How will we know if things are getting better?” A search tool returns the most relevant answer. It’s a bit like Google, except that all results are reported by Times journalists.

The tool, which uses machine learning to most accurately extract what readers want, is a project of The Times’ research and development group. An ever-evolving department of The Times in its current form since 2016, the group is constantly looking for ways technology can elevate journalism.

In June, the R&D team Web site make it easy to share their experimental projects and newsroom collaborations with other technologists, journalists and academics.

While “research and development” may evoke images of locked offices where analysts and inventors are secretly building futuristic prototypes, the reality is a bit different. Members of the 35-person team of technologists, designers, producers, and strategists work closely with the newsroom, which includes technologies already in use or expected soon for other media such as gaming.

“We make calculated bets around these technologies,” says Lana Porter, creative director of R&D, and then experiment with them.

The vaccine FAQ page was created using a technology called natural language processing that uses: machine learning to analyze large volumes of text. The software created by R&D was originally coronavirus FAQ page, a premise that readers sought answers about the virus when it first spread around the world.

“We all understood that if coronavirus was the story of 2020, vaccines were the story of 2021,” said Tara Parker-Pope, Well’s founding editor and editor-in-chief of the FAQ page. “And we really wanted to make sure we were giving readers the same kind of science-based answers to their questions.”

Other advances that R&D has implemented to help journalists expand the possibilities of storytelling include the technology of photogrammetry. Recreates 3D spaces from thousands of 2D photos and recently it was used to create a Model of a church temple in Harlem, and software uses 5G cellular technology to send photos and videos from cameras in the field to computers in the newsroom almost instantly.

“A lot of what we do is try to understand how we adapt technology to the needs of journalism, or sometimes the constraints of journalism,” said Marc Lavallee, chief executive of R&D.

For example, in photogrammetry, which is often used to create 3D scenes for video games, manufacturers need to take thousands of photos that accurately capture a large area. A game company may have months or even years to put together a scene in a game, and if designers can’t get something right, they can artificially fix it later.

“We don’t do that in photojournalism,” Mr. Lavallee said. “So that creates a set of constraints that are somewhat unique to our needs.”

Once a technology is considered viable, part of the job involves figuring out how it can be used by journalists in the field. “How do you create design patterns, pipelines, workflows to actually produce this kind of work at a speed we could never have imagined in the past?” Ms. Porter said, explaining some of the difficulty.

This efficiency can be critical. Using homography, a computer vision technique, a multimedia article was published on the R&D and Sports and Graphics tables. Lamont Marcell Jacobs’ gold medal run In the 100 meters at the Olympics – the day of his race. Photos were taken at a rate of one-fifth of every second, and timestamps were used to keep track of the runners’ positions.

Members of the R&D team will use the new website to connect with other people doing similar work around emerging technologies, and the site will serve as a space for team members to: share the results of a major project, incremental experiments, and other questions the team is considering.

It’s also a place where they can celebrate achievements, like the vehicle used for the vaccine. FAQ The litmus test for most of these technologies is whether they strengthen journalism.

Mr Lavallee said the ultimate goal of all these experiments was “make sense to our readers”.