These are weekly notes from the Internet Research & Future Services team in Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ 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 has been mostly about radio and audio for IRFS. With a little bit of Rhythm and Dance.
Many of us attended one or more of the workshops. AndrewN was particularly committed, attending all of them - "It was great to try out the process and to meet senior people from Radio editorial who seemed really excited about the ideas we came up with."
James attended (RMLL), and gave a on some work he's been doing in his 10% time using the . He also attended talks by other EBU members on cloud encoding and distribution, the , the EBU's new Material Exchange Format (MXF) metadata tools, and the framework for API/plugin based news distribution and content management.
Members of the Applications and Systems teams have been working on Snippets waveforms. Chris Needham has been working with Matt H on the Snippets audio waveform API, which is now working and deployed. Thomas has been pairing with Chris Finch to prototype a client-side Audio Waveform, experimenting with SVG and Canvas for the rendering, JSON and ArrayBuffer for data I/O and resampling.
He says "So far, ArrayBuffer is the fastest to load in memory and has the lowest amount of data to transfer over the network. Surprisingly, the JSON parser is fast even for the longest programme of the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ (10MB of JSON for 6 hours of programme); around 100ms. The SVG rendering is definitely the longest and most CPU intensive operation in the process.
The speed is also variable among browser vendors." The SVG prototype is available on and , using D3.js as a data visualizer.
ChrisL has been mainly been working with Matt Paradis on a journal article about the Web Audio API and has also been working on the test suite for Web Audio. In 10% land, I have continued work on Radiodan, making a free-standing cardboard-box version of the Archers Avoider (Mk3) to demonstrate at hacked.io where I'm helping out Jasmine and Cefn next weekend.
Other activities:
- Jana organised the kick-off meeting for a Semantic Media mini project, with the Universities of Southampton and Sheffield, and News Lab. The project plans to use Linked Open Data to enrich broadcast news with relevant online content and maybe twitter feeds, focusing on Question Time for a first prototype.
- Yves, MichaelS, Andrew McP and ChrisL have had a paper accepted at the (ISWC), and we will also be hosting the (SMAM) there.
- Rob has been finding out what metadata customers want at the , working with Matts H & P on how to implement Oxford's Visor work, chasing up new datasets, looking at Google's new visual search system, working out the next steps for the Snippets waveform tool with the gang and planning future Proteus/Coyopa work.
- Thomas has contributed to various open source projects: including the command-line HTTP server to add gzip compression. It resulted in noticable performance gains for the Snippets Audio Waveform prototype
- Tristan hosted a visit by , who came to talk to us about prototyping with the Internet of Things, which was very interesting.
- Olivier organised and ran a workshop to kick off our work on web archiving, looking at challenges and next steps for archival as well as access (user experience of the archive). He also organised and ran a workshop with some of our R&D North colleagues on how to communicate (externally) about their work better. They looked at identity, key vocabulary, target audiences and practical next steps.
- I created the experimental with the help of Steve Bowbrick from Radio 3 interactive (it tweets when Proms start on Radio 3, and responds to 'now' 'today' 'tomorrow' or specific dates).
Links
- "We've been tracking the nightly builds since Mozilla announced they'd started working on it, but it's been great to see the positive reaction to this official announcement." (ChrisL)
- , , , , (all from Yves)
- bespoke to someone’s flights spurring recollection, reflection and conversation about their travels (video) "interesting especially with our workshop about personalisation and memories yesterday" (AndrewN)
- , (video) (both from Thomas)
- launched last week, the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ is a founding partner. Its aim is to work out how to let people safely share their personal data with organisations, , (from Tristan)
- and (both from Olivier)