Zap2it has been watching the smart people at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., as they try to prove that machines will take over the world one day.

OK, we don't really think that's their objective. So we gave them access to our stories, blogs and reviews and asked them to build a virtual newscast for us. The result is News at Seven, a quirky, amusing and sometimes frightening look into our future…

Or as the smart people at Northwestern put it:

News at Seven is a fully automated approach to creating broadcast news developed at Northwestern University's Intelligent Information Laboratory (InfoLab).

Starting with a topic or story, News at Seven finds and edits relevant stories for presentation, brings forth relevant background visual materials (videos and photos), and augments the primary text using sources such as blogs found on the Web. These resources are then used to drive a set of animated characters who reside in a virtual "news world" we have created for them. The result is a short Flash video that can be broadcast or deployed on the web.

News at Seven can be used to generate a variety of program styles or dynamics, with specific anchor activities and interactions covering not only traditional news but also entertainment stories (in an "Access Hollywood" style) and film reviews (paralleling "Ebert and Roeper").

News at Seven is really two systems: an information and media aggregator and a dynamic presentation platform. Its feature set reflects this dual nature.

On the information aggregation side, it has functionality including collection of news and reviews based upon a topic of interest, automatic generation of queries for retrieval of related opinion and relevant images and videos, and automated filtering of retrieved opinion and video.

On the presentation side, the system processes text for pronunciation, generates speech, controls the avatar and simulated newsroom, programs the Flash Player, and scripts the final rich media presentation.

The end result is a system for machine generated content that is robust, scalable and highly flexible.

For more information about News at Seven, contact hammond@eecs.northwestern.edu.