Through data visualization, Binge provides an easier online search method

With America in the heart of the presidential campaign season, there are signs that the United States is becoming even more polarized as a nation – whether the topic is politics, race relations, gun laws, or who should win an Emmy. Heated battles are not only being played out in person, but in the media as well.

However according to Ishaan Kansal, a computer science student at the University of Illinois, millennials are perhaps more interested in hearing all sides to an argument before formulating an opinion than the previous generation. Kansal is creating an app that will supply access to news stories from various sources and perspectives on topics of the user’s choice, and he is finding the app fills a strong need for his demographic.

“Our current news system is clouding the decisions that the users are making with what they portray.” Kansal said. ”They are providing biased information. There isn’t any one source to turn to for a person to make an intelligent decision, a place that will allow them to know everything that is happening before conveying an opinion.”

Kansal is marketing the Binge app to young adults. He surveyed over 200 of his peers and discovered that they want to become politically involved and find out what’s really happening around the world in order to make a more informed decision.

Kansal is a native of India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government is colliding with students over protests on college campuses. There are those in favor of the government’s action because they believe the students' actions are anti-India, but there are also those favoring the students. Halfway around the world, Kansal is looking for unbiased accounts in order to frame his own opinion.

“What I am finding in my (social media) news feed is that people actually want to know what’s happening,” Kansal said. “Why are some people supporting the government and why are some supporting the students?  Our goal is to redefine how we get our news by working out a system to allow users to see different events that are happening from different perspectives around the world.”

Although providing news coverage from many sides and all corners of the globe about a given event is certainly a motivating factor, in a broader sense Binge is hoping to provide an easier way to collect information on a variety of topics.

Binge is really a solution to a problem that Kansal, and as he discovered, many other people his age face. He recalls sitting in front of his computer screen with 50 tabs open in a web browser looking up information on his favorite show, Game of Thrones. He found himself googling via the different tabs to get the full compliment of material he was looking for.

“I wondered why there couldn’t be an app that could more easily collect data to get news from different web sites and show it to you in one place much more effectively than a search engine or Flip Board,” Kansal said.

Binge is specifically focused on the mobile environment. After downloading the app, the user will see a pre-programmed list of topics they can choose to follow. Then through an RSS feed, Binge will display all the articles on the topic. If a desired topic is not listed, it can still be chosen and articles from a Google search will be populated.

“We will continue to add topics to our database based on topics that users enter,” Kansal said.

Kansal and lead backend developer Rusheel Shahani and Tim Mui from the University of Waterloo and Kunal Shah from the University of Illinois created a prototype at a hackathon in September. They entered it in Student Startup Madness, a national contest formatted similar to the NCAA basketball tournament, whittling down a field of 64 to 32 and finally eight for the finals at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. Binge was accepted into the field and reached the round of 32.

Since then, Kansal has been working computer science professors on implementation. This type of approach is good news for bloggers, who could have a larger reach if more people use a search to find their news as opposed to leaning on a few of the more well-known news sources.

Kansal is consulting with as many people as he can to help refine his data methods with the hopes of beginning Beta testing by the end of the summer.

If Binge and similar approaches take flight, might it change how presidential campaigns are run in the future?

Kansal responded, “I’m not sure how it’s going to affect politics, but the main objective of this is to provide just the facts to the users in a more objective view and allow them to make their more informed decisions.”