This week, Andrew N grappled with data models and tried to output the data from the ABC-IP Tagging Experiment into a format for Shauna to analyse. It's mind-bending stuff. He also worked on surfacing more images on the episode pages to help Pete follow some possible design directions on the World Service prototype, while Pete returned the favour by doing UX thinking and wireframing for it. Chris L added user registration and login using the ever-excellent OmniAuth library. Yves spent a lot of time this week preparing things for IBC, including a paper on the automated tagging work in the archive technology session, a booth in the Future Zone, and a panel discussion. He spent some time setting up automated deployment for the prototype, adding tag aggregations and programme brand aggregations, and putting pagination in various places. He also included tags derived from synopsis, titles and associated web pages in the set of tags displayed on episode pages, which were derived using a custom instance of Wikipedia Miner over the last week. And we are almost done automatically generating tags from subtitles for another large archive of Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ programmes.
Barbara closely followed the team’s progress on the authentication work - including some great work by Dan who has been able to make tags work on the live TV stream using the modified RadioTag protocol. In between reviewing Joanne’s draft report on the Chrome extension and the wireframes for the next steps on the authentication project, Barbara did lots of admin for the wider FI-Content project and, along with myself and Chris G, took part in numerous telcos on its next stages.
Anthony’s been investigating HTML5 video streaming events and updating the Snippets clipboard to support transcoding of high, medium and low resolution clips.
Newest team member James worked on creating a simple MPEG-DASH encoding system which takes DVB-T multiplexes, pulls channels out and segments and transcodes them. The MPEG-DASH descriptor file is generated from the encoded segments and their metadata, and once it’s all working it should be a great backend for egBox. It’s pulling out EPG data from the transport streams and storing it to be exposed via an API, which should make prototyping things involving the EPG a bit easier.
Sean continued his odyssey into management by doing almost nothing else all week apart from interviewing Ruby and Javascript software engineers. Tristan had a range of discussions with our radio and iPlayer colleagues and a debate around which of the upcoming EU calls for collaboration we’re interested in.
Shauna is half way through her summer internship with us, so Theo and Tristan meet her university supervisor and had an interesting discussion about archives, tagging and digital humanities. We also had a great visit from to share demos and stories about doing R&D for a media company.
Former IRFS trainee Becky Gregory-Clarke presented a paper at Euro ITV 2012 concerning a recommender system field trial which used dynamic collaborative filtering. She also presented a poster about a novel user-controlled interface for TV recommendations and showed a tablet-based demo using our client-side recommender engine.
And the design team went along to the . There was a wide variety of good work, especially from Dundee, Ravensbourne College and Central St Martins whose graduates are tackling the intersection of digital and physical products as well as some interesting research methods to inform the design of those products and experiences.
Weekly links: