KITspotlight: A System for Spotlighting Researchers in the Media

Academic institutions, such as universities, heavily rely on public relations and are thus interested in media monitoring. However, tracking mentions of their researchers in news articles presents challenges such as identifying affiliated personnel and their departments, and aggregating the extracted information. In this paper, we introduce KITspotlight, a novel system that automatically identifies researchers of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in newspaper articles, associates these individuals with their departments, and presents this information visually. KITspotlight is tailored for both department heads, administrative staff, and individual researchers, focussing on the institution’s overall public visibility or individual researcher’s public appearance. Analyzing data from 2,280 articles over 12 months, our system offers a model for monitoring academic personnel at any research institution.