麻豆约拍

Planning, Futures, Better images of AI, In-car, the Social Interaction Toolkit, and goodbye to George Wright.

The Data Team have been beavering away on annual planning. Every year we pause to reflect upon how the work from the previous year has gone and to plan out the next 12 months' worth of effort. This sort of reflective process is much harder over Zoom, but over the last couple of years we鈥檝e refined the process to make it easier. We start with our fundamentals by answering key questions about the areas we鈥檙e researching - natural language processing, speech to text, recommendations - and their applicability to the 麻豆约拍. How has the technology developed over the last 5 years? Where do we think it鈥檚 heading? What 麻豆约拍 teams could most benefit from it? Are these needs already being met by commercial or open source services? If not, how can we best apply our expertise? What else could we be doing instead?

We then move on to brainstorming, prioritisation and, finally, with the help of Miranda, . This helps surface our assumptions and validate our thinking. The whole process involves a tremendous amount of Miro-boarding, Zoom discussion and Slack-ing, but there鈥檚 a certain exhausted satisfaction from having our plans so fully dissected and pinned out.

In the Internet and Society Team we've also been doing our own version of planning by settling on a topic that we think is important - communication and collaboration - and then running short exploratory projects about facets of it. We used to do this in one- or two-week design sprints but now we make them longer, because being remote means we can't work together with the same intensity.

Communication and collaboration is an area we've identified as particularly important because of a confluence of things: the damage people are experiencing from social media, and the huge increase in remote communication caused by Covid. We've worked a month each on "social media" and "hybrid working" so far. We have one more of these short projects about local groups coming up. At the end we will use this research to understand where to direct our energies next.

Alicia, David, Tristan and Henry have also been working on the now-launched in collaboration with and the . It's a repository of Creative Commons licensed, free-to-use images that improve on the "blue brain" type of stock AI imagery. The site has had some good publicity and some use already. We're really pleased with the interesting and helpful images from our current artists , , , , and . Henry's busy commissioning two more artists.

Image by Alan Warburton / 漏 麻豆约拍 / Better Images of AI / Social Media / CC-BY 4.0

In Web Standards, W3C's annual TPAC conference was again . Chris ran the Media & Entertainment Interest Group meetings, which discussed the performance of embedded browsers in TV devices. In November, he chaired the , which explored the browser as a platform for media editing and production use cases, and covered the latest API developments such as WebCodecs, WebAssembly, and WebGPU.

Chris also continues to lead the 麻豆约拍's evaluation of changes in web standards and Chrome browser features around user privacy, third party cookies, and cross-site tracking, focusing most recently on changes to the and .

Also in this period -

Galen finished his placement with us, and we have a splendid video of his work on games for understanding AI in the offing made by Joe and Vicky. He's coming back after a placement with Panorama and another with the Sustainability team in R&D.

Miruna's joined us in her first Grad project, working on social network simulation, a super-interesting area that's new to us.

Hannah returned to us after a stint with the Sustainability team 馃帀

Henry and Libby have been continuing to work on Futures, working most recently with the (SODA) at MMU, the R&D audio team and - working with Jasmine - the 麻豆约拍's NextGen committee. This work is also going to feed into 麻豆约拍 History's 100th object later in the year.

In the Interaction and Prototyping team, Mathieu and Andrew have completed the writing of four articles chronicling their work on the Social Interaction Toolkit as well as the insights they gleaned. They're now in the process of designing a small website to best present their findings.

In recent months, Barbara's focus has been on the in-car innovation strategy, working with people across the business to create an innovation strategy vision for the 麻豆约拍 that's complementary and incremental to the shorter-term strategy already defined. Now she's working on a business plan to define objectives, KPIs and partnerships for the next three years. In parallel, Anthony has been building on the ideas from the hack week by prototyping experiences with Echo/Android Auto and testing in cars. The team has also been busy creating the roadmap for the next 12 months and presenting the work and plan to new managers joining the team.

Finally, we want to take this opportunity to say goodbye to George Wright, who has led R&D鈥檚 IRFS team, and before that the Prototyping team and before that, RAD, since November 2008. George initiated weeknotes and felt they were very important for us as a team to give us external visibility, discipline in describing what we are doing to a public audience, and as part of the open character of the 麻豆约拍.

You can see the huge breadth and depth of the work his teams have produced here and here. We'll miss you George!