Welcome to the regular update from the Internet Research & Future Services team in ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ R&D, making new things on, for and with the internet.
Talking with Machines
Andrew and Tom made videos of the Voice UI (VUI) prototypes made for ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Children's. These, along with storyboards and animatics, are presentation materials we can now use to demonstrate and explain our work, along with Henry's upcoming write-up of our user experience findings.
You can also catch Henry on the podcast.
"No system that currently exists is as smart as people think it is.β
Work continues on the interactive radio piece with Rosina Sound. Ant and Tom have been investigating how we can use api.ai to power the experience on the Alexa and Google ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ platforms.
Atomised Media
Thomas has been putting together two video summaries that show the search tool results on News stories based on LDP tag search.
Tellybox
David has been refining and developing ideas from the earlier workshop with the Red Button+ UX team.
Automated scene segmentation
Craig has been creating some hand annotated scene boundaries for Big Bang Theory, Buffy and EastEnders. These will be used as ground truth data to test his automated scene detection tool. He's also been looking at different methods for benchmarking against these boundaries.
Speech-to-Text
Ben has been continuing his work on the GStreamer Kaldi plugin. We've spoken to potential users across the organisation and have a list of requirements to be implemented.
Face Recognition
Matt and Chrissy have written a Python binding for the recognition engine. They used to create the link between Python and C++ which made the job very straightforward to achieve.
Fusion
Denise has been looking into examples of the "Fusion" of machine learning systems for ideas on how we might combine our face recognition, speech-to-text, shot/scene detection and speaker ID into a single system.
Other
The Discovery team is currently consolidating its work on Editorial Algorithms and scoping ideas for their next phase of work. They hope to address some of the problems which concern people about the current state of the Internet e.g. filter bubbles and fake news.
Nat Buckley and Dan Williams gave a talk to us about their bespoke internet-connected radio called , which runs on the Radiodan platform.
Barbara had a brainstorming/planning session with Joanne on SDC (self-driving cars)
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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 ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ. 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.