These are weekly notes from the Internet Research & Future Services team in 鲍鱼tv R&D where we share what we do. We work in the open, using technology and design to make new things on the internet. You can follow us on Twitter at .
This week saw a number of people still excited about wires and soldering after a very successful physical prototyping workshop. There was progress on the ViSTA-TV project and a cool new visualisation for the World Service Archive prototype, and as usual, preparations for upcoming talks and projects. Less usual: we also had several projects accepted by partners or funding bodies in the same week!
Physical prototyping
Our Thursday show and tell concluded a week of enthusiasm about physical prototyping with demos of all the prototypes which the team had built. A tweet-printing owl, a toy car controlled by the tilt of your head and the pitch of your voice, and others I would have even more trouble describing.
James and MattH were so inspired by it that they both put in an order for a whole load of microchips and components. Matt has no idea how to use all the stuff yet, while James spent his Friday lunchtime soldering up some breakout boards.
Meanwhile, AndrewN is really interested in the talk about for physics-based UI interactions. ()
Vista-TV and ABC-IP
Chris Newell has been exploring how we can apply video feature extraction technology, developed by partners in the ViSTA-TV project, to our live TV services. The extracted features will be used by the ViSTA-TV stream engine to provide improved recommendations.
Yves has published one of the last items for the ABC-IP project framework: a visualisation showing archive programmes that relate to current topics being discussed on 鲍鱼tv News, pictured above. Meanwhile our partners Metabroadcast have been working on improving their .
Talks and Conferences
This week looked like almost everyone was speaking, going to a conference, or simply preparing a position paper.
Denise gave an internal talk on Wednesday as part of Jana's machine learning lunches entitled 'Biologically Inspired Features for Image Analysis'.
Jana's paper on evaluating the use of the mood GUI on Redux has been accepted for the , its full title is 'Evaluation of a Mood-Based Graphical User Interface for Accessing TV Archives'.
is getting closer, and so Penny has been helping Joanne prepare for her presentation of our authentication paper for the TV UX workshop on connected experiences. Joanne has also been going through the schedule to make sure she gets to see presentations of interest to the team.
Yves also got a workshop proposal accepted at ISWC'13, 'First International Workshop on Semantic Music and Media' (or SMAM2013, for short).
Tristan went to the "Digitisation Doctor" event at the Wellcome Institute, a day of talks for organisations starting to digitise their archives. There are a lot of organisations wanting to do this, from the Kennel Club to the John Innes Institute to Sutton County Council. He gave .
James attended the 25th on Thursday to talk and listen to members of the UK's internet engineering community; the conversations often turned video-heavy with an excellent talk from Thomas Kernen (of Cisco) on MPEG-DASH and a presentation from Akamai's chief network architect (Patrick Gilmore) about how they operated their content delivery system.
New projects on the horizon
ChrisG and Barbara spent the majority of this week attending the kick-off meeting in Paris for the second phase of the behemoth "Future Internet - Content Project". Several new partners have joined the consortium so it was a good opportunity to meet everyone and get a sense of what people are interested in and will be working on. We've got a rough plan for the first 6 months for each of the work packages we're involved with.
In other Euro-project news, our MediaScape proposal to the EU about coordinated media devices has scored highly in FP7 call 10.
We also had a mini project proposal accepted by the , working with the Universities of Southampton and Sheffield on 'SemanticNews: enriching publishing of news stories'. The project will aim to 鈥減romote people's comprehension and assimilation of news by augmenting live broadcast news articles with information from the semantic web.鈥�
Finally, Rob has been finishing off the proposals for Snippets for Radio Phase 2, talking to folks in Radio about how best to hoover up all the incredibly valuable programme data that's often left hanging around in word docs, and preparing a sample dataset to train up face recognition programmes for our work with Oxford University.
Links
As always, the team had a great selection of links: Yves suggested having a look at the (which will be streamed live on the 23rd), this piece on and , a distributed online machine learning framework.
Tristan found this page of which may not be new, but is still quite interesting.
And finally, AndrewN loved illustrating the kinds of distances which the mind usually struggles to imagine.