Tellybox
Libby is planning our trip to show our "half resolution" prototypes in the Blue Room in Media City. Tim's been looking at previous work by our friends at UCL on , trying to help us evaluate our tellybox prototypes with groups of people in a way that鈥檚 fun and appealing to participants, but also scientifically rigorous.
Talking with Machines
Henry, Tom, Andrew and Joanne have been working on our design research project with the Children's team in the 麻豆约拍. They kicked off with a workshop where they used our Scenario Mapping technique to identify some promising areas for Voice-UI apps, and then worked up some ideas from those scenarios into storyboards with some guidance from the Children's team.
Tom has been re-engineering Teddy Ruxpin in order to put him to work for and Tellybox. Ant has been looking at Google 麻豆约拍; both , its high-level CUI design tool and the lower-level Actions API.
Newsbeat Explains
Tim, Joanne and Barbara have been continuing to analyse data from the trial. Barbara鈥檚 been interviewing journalists who worked on the project, Joanne鈥檚 been coding interview and questionnaire responses and writing up our findings, and Tim鈥檚 done some further work evaluating usage logs from the trial, looking for interesting patterns of behaviour that might help us corroborate our findings from the interviews and questionnaires.
Atomised Media
Chris and Lei from News Labs have been working on a tool to allow us to search news articles by Linked Data Platform tags. The work was started by R&D trainee Alan, and we've been working to add more detail to the search results and to allow the tool to work with both news and sports articles.
Public Service Internet
Tim, Olivier and Sacha met with from Link枚ping University鈥檚 Department Of Technology and Social Change to discuss 鈥榝ake news鈥� and fact-checking, and explore ways that our work might align with David鈥檚 research interests - in particular ways of visualising and authenticating the provenance of online information.
The Secret Science of Pop
You might have seen a trailer on 麻豆约拍4 recently for a documentary called which we worked on last year and are excited to finally be able to talk about publicly! Tim鈥檚 spent some of this week writing up our work on it for a blog post which we鈥檒l publish soon.
Editorial Algorithms
David, Matt, Frankie, Olivier and Kate have been working on our front-end tools. The Stream Builder now allows end users to create their own searches and is being alpha tested with 麻豆约拍 colleagues in IRFS and at demo days. David completed the designs for the Compact View in Search & Stream - the tool that allows users to see and filter the results of their searches. The first iteration of changes incorporates feedback from our colleagues in 麻豆约拍 Monitoring. Fionnt谩n has started working on 鈥淪mart Streams鈥� considering how we might kick-start end user driven training and improvements to Streams.
On the Platform side, Josh has been making amazing progress moving our components to the 麻豆约拍鈥檚 COSMOS platform - a process that will ultimately allow us to handover support of the backend/platform to the 麻豆约拍鈥檚 24/7 Support Team.In the research space Fionnt谩n has started on an API and front-end demo to show off what is possible with the clustering and news-space ideas 鈥� grouping news stories both by event and by topic.
Olivier and David took part in a day-long event organised by Connected Studios and the Academy, to share the tools and demonstrators we鈥檝e built on top of our 鈥渆ditorial algorithms". There was a lot of good feedback which should mean more people using our tools.
Vivo-NewsLabs-IRFS Hackday
Katie and Barbara worked with members of , and CPS-Vivo (a News production tool) to arrange a joint HackDay. So far, we've had a pre-hack meeting to introduce the teams to each other and shared knowledge of the platforms and tools that they work on and with. As part of this Olivier presented the Editorial Algorithm APIs, raw tech and tools. Tim鈥檚 been raiding the project to generate datasets for the hackday - there鈥檚 crowdsourced and editorially checked tags for about 20000 radio programmes and we鈥檙e looking forward to seeing what people at the hackday might do with them!
Starfruit
Chris Newell has been exploring feature selection in our Starfruit tagging system, with the aim of improving performance and reducing model size.
Speech To Text
Matt and Chrissy have been building an acoustic model for end-to-end Speech-to-Text using Tensorflow and have reproduced a model from a paper and are now testing various approaches to decoding the model.
COMMA
Matt, Chrissy and Ben have been testing and fixing bugs in and writing documentation. Ben has also been making Web VTT from the output from various algorithms being developed as part of the CAT project so that we can display the data alongside audio or video in the browser. He has also been adding centralized logging and metrics collection to Comma using Kibana and Grafana.
Scene Detection
Craig has been implementing the algorithm in Makarand Tapaswi's "" paper to detect scene boundaries and evaluate it on 麻豆约拍 programmes.
Other Stuff
Working with Richard Sewell, Libby has made a new version of libbybot, her webRTC-based robot avatar.
Chris was at the last Monday and Tuesday for the annual Radio Hack. He worked on adding RadioDNS capability to an Android app using the OMRI API.
Tim to the R&D engineers meeting on Haskell, Functional programming, and writing programs for humans first and machines second.
Links
- : Getting the most from your broadcast audio processor - handy intro to the magic that happens in between the studio and your radio in order to make everything sound good!
- : How fitness technologies turn the body into an investment property - great read on the political implications of quantified-self technologies, time management and the culture of 鈥榖ig data鈥�.
- - more 鈥楽cience of Pop鈥� from Vox magazine - a great nerdy music-theory read on a recent trend in pop songwriting.