IBC is to present the International Honour for Excellence (IHFE) to renowned editor Thelma Schoonmaker during this year’s IBC Show.
The award recognises Schoonmaker’s contribution to the art and craft of filmmaking, spanning more than five decades and helping shape modern cinema through her close collaboration with Martin Scorsese.
The award will be presented in person on Sunday 14 September at 18.00 CEST on the main stage of the IBC Conference in the RAI Amsterdam.
Schoonmaker will also participate in a Fireside Chat about her life in film earlier in the day, which will be free to attend for all IBC2025 attendees.
Speaking about the decision to present Schoonmaker with the award, Michael Crimp, IBC’s chief executive officer, said: “Thelma Schoonmaker’s unique contribution and legacy is felt across the entire media world. Her dedication to storytelling, technical brilliance and lifelong commitment to collaboration exemplify the very best of our industry. People are at the heart of IBC, and we’re proud to honour those who have not only shaped the media we all know and love—but who continue to inspire new generations to come.”
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IBC is also recognising Globo, Latin America’s largest media company, with a Special Award for its continued leadership, innovation and support for global media advancement. Alongside consistent commitment to industry collaboration, cultural storytelling and audience connection, Globo is leading new initiatives to accelerate Brazil’s next broadcasting evolution with the rollout of TV 3.0, said IBC.
Alexis Allemann, Sebastien Noir and Andrei Popescu-Belis will be presented with the Best Technical Paper at IBC2025 for their work developing an AI Chatbot for Trusted News, underpinned with strict editorial standards and transparency. The paper is entitled EBU NEO – A sophisticated multilingual chatbot for a trusted news ecosystem exploration.
The authors, from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and la Haute École d’Ingénierie et de Gestion du Canton de Vaud (HEIG-VD), sought to address the quality, bias and transparency concerns of commercial news chatbots. Their approach was to optimise Retrieval Augmented Generation (a technique used to enhance Large Language Models). The result is a database of over 3.5 million articles growing by 3000 news stories per day, and an invaluable tool for both professional journalists and the public to explore the news.
Paul Entwistle, chair of the IBC Technical Papers Committee and Peer Review Panel, said: “The paper was very well written, providing an excellent technical disclosure, innovative improvements, detailed performance comparisons and a case study with important lessons on deploying a public-facing AI. The topic itself, trusted news in the age of AI, is critically important, with the EBU uniquely positioned to develop such a system. The paper highlights the scale and complexity of the task, the impressive capabilities that AI can bring, as well as reminding us of its current limitations. This is excellent work – and significant beyond our own industry.”
