Rahila Jafari presents her team's final project.

Cutting-edge internship empowers women in tech to revamp newspaper processes

Jake Garcia

August 19, 2024

Rahila Jafari admitted she knew little about the inner workings of the news industry and even less about the specifics of newspaper layout design.

But she was eager to embrace the challenge, noting it paled in comparison to the obstacles she had faced in recent years.

Jafari is a junior at Arizona State University (ASU), majoring in data science. Along with five other students, she recently completed a 10-week summer internship through ASU Enterprise Technology. The first-of-its-kind program was part of a university-wide initiative, ASU for Refugees, which launched in 2021 to support Afghan refugees.

Jafari arrived in Phoenix in September 2021, knowing she faced an uphill battle. English was her third language, and she would have to learn not just a new city, but also a new culture and way of life.

“After the collapse of the government, the situation didn’t allow me to live in Afghanistan,” she said. “I couldn’t do my activities freely that I wanted. Women are banned from education, from work, from everything. I’m not the type of person to stay at home and look after people. I would get depressed, so I had to find a way to get out of Afghanistan and follow my dreams.”

That path led Jafari and five other women from Afghanistan to the summer internship. From early June to mid-August, she worked alongside classmates and staff mentors at the ASU Artificial Intelligence Cloud Innovation Center (AICIC) to gain experience in analytics, cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI). The AICIC is a partnership between ASU and AWS to combine the technology advances of AWS with the university’s research and development capabilities to help amplify digital transformation in and around Phoenix.

The AICIC connected the students to a nonprofit venture affiliated with ASU called NEWSWELL, which was seeking to rethink and modernize the process of newspaper layout, page design and article generation. They tasked the students with making the layout more dynamic, the design more intuitive and equipping an editor with AI tools to make the process repeatable and less time consuming.

The work culminated in a final presentation, which the six women delivered on Wednesday, August 14.

Their premise was that many of the processes news editors are using are inefficient and could be revamped through Amazon Web Services (AWS) at the AICIC, such as AP Gateway, Lambda and Bedrock.

“This was not a classroom experience,” said Bonnie Wilde, executive director of partnerships at ASU Enterprise Technology. “We didn’t have a rubric to grade them on. We didn’t know what the final presentation would even be when we started.”

Wilde said the only certainty was the positive value the students would draw from exposure to the resources provided by AWS and ASU Enterprise Technology.

“Technology changes so very quickly, so getting them on that cutting edge and letting them explore and actually produce something, it’s amazing,” she said.

Both Wilde and Jafari are pleased with how the group project unfolded.

They created a proof of concept platform for editors that accomplishes front-end tasks, such as web page development, news generation and layout consistency, and back-end tasks that turn editor-submitted content into brief summaries through AI.

The predicted outcomes are improved efficiency (reducing what they estimate currently as a two- or three-week process to a task that can be accomplished in a few hours) and increased flexibility, all while maintaining high quality standards.

“It couldn’t have turned out any better,” Wilde said.

Jafari said the experience was invaluable and validated her path to ASU Enterprise Technology.

“I was born and grew up in a country where women now lack their basic rights, which is education,” she said. “(In this internship) I worked in a group with all women, even our mentor was a woman, so it’s special for me. I feel so lucky that I’m part of this team.”