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Experiences

Mediascape / Euromeme

Chris went to the last MediaScape plenary meeting before the project ends in March. He presented our user evaluation of the Euromeme prototype, and our video of the prototype in use. He has also made progress on the technical deliverable documentation for the project.

With help from Libby, Joanne has published a blog post about Euromeme that includes the demo video:

Work continues on our WebGL and Web Audio based VR music demo. We've refactored the code to improve performance on mobile devices.

Set Top box

Libby met with Peter Lasko and Andrew White from the TV iPlayer team a couple of weeks ago. They are very interested in us exploring ways that we could improve watching with family and friends in the same room. She has also investigated Apple TV as a potential prototyping platform.

Libby also met with Rob Wadge and had an interesting discussion about the development of set top boxes, the approach to standards in the IP studio project, which involves three month iterations and hackathon type with hardware manufacturers.

W3C TV Control API

Chris joined the latest conference call of the , where we discussed plans for creating a to continue the standardisation work on the API specification. The group also discussed new requirements and use cases, in particular the need to address security and user privacy in the specification.

Atomised News

The team has made progress using the CPS and Vivo APIs - we will be using Vivo as the CMS for our work. Barbara and Tristan carried out a project review with Andy Conroy. Thomas updated the UX to address user testing feedback, applied Newsbeat branding, added share tools and created a animation of the product. 

Anthony and Chrissy started work on setting up our AWS infrastructure via Cosmos. While Lara has been tweaking the front end styling including accordion transitions and media embeds.

Story Explorer

Andrew, Tristan and and Zillah met up with James from to see the development work on the TV story explorer. Excellent progress has been made - the work should be complete by the end of February. Andrew is applying the design templates and wireframes to other TV Brands. The team also met up with Rob to discuss type services for TV.

360 Video

Andrew ran 6 user testing sessions. Participants were shown the same 360 video(s) on 3 different viewing scenarios: Laptop, Phone, Head mounted display. The same testing is currently happening in the North Lab and at Middlesex University.

EBU Radio Hack

Chris attended the EBU’s annual event, part of their . We showed our work from the project on controlling radio devices from a Web browser, to get interest from device manufacturers and other broadcasters, as well as add some new features and fix some bugs in the code.

Discovery

Georgios has been working to improve our categories classifier and has been combining several estimators with complementary results. Others in the team having been acquiring ground truth data to support classification work in additional languages and for a new work stream which aims to identify the main protagonist in features and news articles.

Data

Much of the sprint has been spent doing hand-over but in addition there were three notable things:

Matt and Rob had a good session with R&D Senior Management explaining our speech-to-text work, including the upcoming publication of our Â鶹ԼÅÄ internal Tech Note evaluating what’s the state of the art academically and commercially for this technology.

We also welcome back Tim Cowlishaw to help out with some Snippets bug-fixing and general effort into getting the service back on a firm footing. Lots of users in Production will, no doubt, be very pleased by this news.

COMMA has been taken out of its cupboard to get a dust down and some attention ahead of its transfer into the wider Â鶹ԼÅÄ.

Finally, Jana has been continuing to improve the performance of the search engine and testing it on real datasets.

Goodbye and Hello

Umm, whenever I'm on weeknotes it seems I need to do a goodbye. We wish good luck to Data Team founder member, James Harrison who’s off to pastures new at , and to Malin Andersson our Senior Creative Director.

Stop, enough of the tears. We have some new team members joining the Discovery team. Fionntán has joined us as a data scientist and Michel has joined for a graduate trainee project looking at user profiling. Finally, we've welcomed Manish, as a Senior Engineer/DevOps, who will help us reach the state of the art in continuous delivery and smooth the transfer of our systems to production.

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