Latest from Internet Research & Future Services team in ±«Óătv R&D, making new things on, for and with the internet. This sprint: A look at how we scope our projects, ongoing conversation with machines, tellybox, and crates. Lots of crates.
We’ve continuing to collaborate with Rosina Sound on the story which we’re using to drive development of the story engine; we’ve just about built a fully-working alpha version of the story, which will now be redrafted ready for professional recording and sound design in June.
Andrew and Joanne worked with Mark O'Hanlon from ±«Óătv Childrens on the second version of the script for our “Go Jetters” prototype, and we had the audio recorded, with help from Sacha.
Joanne has been coordinating the testing for both Voice UI prototypes, which will take place at the end of May.
Tellybox
This week we spent time figuring out how best to work with children and young people to understand what the future of television might become. Libby, Joanne, and Tim were joined by Jasmine from the R&D User Experiences Group and Spencer from the Blue Room for an afternoon at UTC College in Salford. They had a great time working with pupils. . We'd like to thank everyone who participated - it was incredibly helpful for us to get different perspectives on the problem, and great to work with such enthusiastic and interesting people.
We've also submitted the final version of our TVX review paper - we'll be at TVX in June in Hilversum in the Netherlands with our nine speculative prototypes.
We're hiring!
We are looking for a and help prototype new online formats for news. It’s a one-year contract, based in London.
Data Science, Standards, and getting ready for a new home
In the data team corner, Craig has been running larger scale evaluations of his shot and scene detection software to produce the final figures for his technote and has continued writing up his conclusions. Chrissy and Matt have been consolidating their CTC (Connectionist Temporal Classification) speech to text work using tensorflow, and writing up the results of their research.
Meanwhile, Ben has been finished off the prototype near-realtime speech to text software. He has been testing its accuracy against the Multi-Genre Broadcasting Challenge evaluation task so that it can be compared against the offline version, and has been measuring its resource usage and speed. He's also been talking to potential users about testing it on their content.
In standards-land, Olivier is now back from his time in China at the W3C AC meeting. He has spent a chunk of time since then following up on contacts, ideas and actions generated there. And Chris Needham has been working hard behind the scenes on the working of the W3C TV Control Working group, working with industry colleagues on the future of the work.
Finally, the crates have been delivered: we will soon say good-bye to our lab near Euston station in central London, consolidating the team in our “South Lab” in West London.
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Internet Research and Future Services section
The Internet Research and Future Services section is an interdisciplinary team of researchers, technologists, designers, and data scientists who carry out original research to solve problems for the ±«Óătv. Our work focuses on the intersection of audience needs and public service values, with digital media and machine learning. We develop research insights, prototypes and systems using experimental approaches and emerging technologies.