We moved offices this week, away from , to shiny and modern West London. This disrupted us for around 20 minutes and then we got on with researching and invented the future (with a bit of dissemination and meet-the-colleagues on the side.)
I spent Monday rehearsing for a big ±«Óătv internal conference. On Tuesday I went to it, along with pretty much all of the team. Kirsty Wark chaired the day and so Rob and I explained our work to her and people from around Future Media and the ±«Óătv. I signed her up to the World Service Archive trial, then Yves, Tristan and others joined colleagues from in R&D in the break, demoing more of our work to the attendees. I enjoyed , and then scooted off to Warsaw to present some of our ideas for collaboration at an EU Proposers Day- kinda like blind dating but for cross-border R&D.
Snippets
James is working on Snippets, porting the core application to a new framework for future development and working with Gareth on restructuring the core app and its APIs. For Rob, this week’s effort has mostly been around presentations and securing new datasets. We have a number of new academic partners interested in our Framestore data (half a billion images representing every single second from the last 5 year’s worth of ±«Óătv TV broadcasts) which we’d like to partner with.
egBox
James is also working on the egBox demo platform, looking at portable DVB modulators to help properly demonstrate the complete system from antenna to screen in isolation outside the UK.
Sibyl
Chris Newell is working on an update to our which will replace the current metadata-based approach with a hybrid which includes collaborative filtering. MyMediaLite, the open-source recommender system library initiated in the collaborative research project, has released version 3.03 with improved support for the kNN algorithms we use.
Radiophonic Work(shop)
Pete and Andrew Nicolaou worked on a website, and Chris Lowis and Matt Paradis fine-tuned the demos for the upcoming (to be held at the Southbank in London. ) - we’re putting together a micro-site showing Chris’s and Matt’s four interactive demos alongside the source code and a bit of history about the original machines.
World Service
Editing of speaker names in the World Service archive is now live (and already 250 names have been contributed by our initial set of users), and Yves’s working on more tools to validate or correct speaker names when they have been inferred by our automated tools, so that we can use the edited data as a basis for evaluating our speaker recognition algorithm.
Vista TV
Libby ran a workshop on possible applications for VistaTV data (with the help of Olivier, Chris Newell, Tristan and Vicky). 32 people attended from both inside the ±«Óătv and outside, and they produced a large number of interesting ideas for us to explore in the next few weeks. Libby also attended a very useful course on run by Andy Kirk.
Visitors
On Wednesday Andrew invited Knight-Mozilla Fellow to give an overview of his work with and new approaches to telling stories on the web. He gave a very interesting survey of the current state-of-the-art, mainly using HTML5 media framework to mix web content and services with audio and video. Some of this was experimental, ) and some was an evolution of established presentation types like
Links
Rob liked the Internet Archive’s new . Olivier rated this fairly old essay by Neal Stephenson on “.”
Andrew N plugged Chrome Canary’s new support for CSS Shaders which enable “Cinematic Effects using CSS and HTML.” See a