Florent Daudens

Content | Innovation | Management

Passionate about AI and technology trends, driven by news and enriched by human connection, I've been shaping the digital evolution of major media outlets for 15+ years.


Experience

As the current Director of Newsgathering and Deployment for national and international news at Radio-Canada, I orchestrate operations across five international bureaus, parliamentary bureaus in Quebec and Ottawa, and news journalists in Montreal.

In my former position as News Director at Le Devoir, I led a sweeping digital transformation. This involved overseeing editorial teams, initiating specialized units in video and data visualization, launching a variety of innovative products such as applications, newsletters, and election coverage, venturing into new coverage domains, and driving artificial intelligence initiatives.

Simultaneously, I have the opportunity to instruct digital journalism at the University of Montreal's Graduate Diploma in Journalism program. I remain committed to fostering growth in our profession, with contributions to the board of FPJQ and Trente magazine, as well as involvement in groups like Hacks/Hackers Montreal. My diverse experience spans roles at La Presse, Rue89, France3, and the Federation of Quebec Journalists.

Click here to view my detailed resume.


Projects

The AI Gazette

With a curiosity to explore ChatGPT's programming abilities, I crafted a program using Python, FeedParser, and OpenAI's API.

Hosted on AWS for automation, this program sends out an email at 8 a.m. daily, providing a summary of the past 24 hours' AI-related articles using text-davinci-003. You can find more details in this post.

🤖🗳️ Resultbot, the Election Results Robot

Three objectives for this project:

  • Test the capabilities of large language models to interact with numerical data
  • Evaluate the agents' reasoning abilities to answer a question
  • Record user interactions to improve prompts and potentially fine-tune a model

For those who like to look under the hood, I've tested several solutions. The final configuration relies on a Pandas agent from LangChain, GPT-4 for the language model, Langsmith for interaction tracking, and Streamlit for deployment.

To try out the tool, click here. For more details on this project, see this post.

📰🧵 AI-Assisted Twitter Thread Generator

A simple tool to flood the Internet generate a Twitter thread (or the 24th letter of the alphabet) from news articles, and an opportunity to test LangChain Hub for prompts. This project uses:

  • Streamlit for the user interface
  • OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo for text generation
  • LangChain Hub for access to predefined models and prompts
  • Newspaper3k for online article extraction

To try out the tool, click here. For more details on this project, read this post.


Certificates

Artificial Intelligence
  • Large Language Models with Semantic Search - DeepLearning.AI
  • LangChain for LLM Application Development - DeepLearning.AI
  • ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers - DeepLearning.AI
  • AI For Everyone - Coursera

Data Visualization
  • Data Visualization and Infographics with D3 - Knight Center
  • Doing Journalism with Data - European Journalism Center
  • QGIS - Knight Center