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This week in brief - iPads and design sketches, bug-fixing and copywriting, questions and journeys, and a few very long meetings.

We’ve said we’ll try to do two large projects at a time, plus a longer-running on in the background, P2PNext. This week we’ve had 3 (+1) ongoing projects in various stages of exploration, development and wrap-up.

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This week feels a bit hectic before it has even started; we're finishing off two projects, Inbound Links and the quiz, and doing proper scoping for two new ones, the Digital Programme Guide and the Digital Friendship project. Finally we've got a login for the tool we're going to use to track and manage workflow on our individual projects. Tris and I have just got to do some initial set-up and agree some basic principles for how we're going to use it.

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We're sorry to report that our colleague Ian Forrester, who runs the and blog, has been taken ill, and is currently in hospital in Manchester.  We've posted on Ian's condition on the Backstage blog, and as we hear developments we'll post updates there.

We've all been very moved by the huge number of messages of support and Ian and his family will appreciate them deeply.  However, we are asking people to avoid speculation regarding his condition as that can cause unintended distress.

A few weeks ago I had a phone call asking if we could put on a demonstration of Ambisonics for a TV studio full of people. As you may have noticed, I'm always keen to talk about my work and I agreed to figure out how to put on this demonstration. In R&D we've a modest amount of experience setting up small rigs, Chris Baume set up one rig for some listening tests and another for some demonstrations for our internal Audio & Music festival. I set up our Manchester Ambisonics listening room, and rigs in Newcastle for the Maker Faire and for an internal demonstration we did at a month ago (ok, I admit it, I've been geeky enough to set up a four speaker array at home too.) All of these rigs were set up in contollable acoustic environments and were optimised to be suitable for 1 to 6 listeners. The TV studio was going to have an audience of about 150. After a chat with Chris and Andrew Mason we set about trying to identify some of the problems we were lightly to face. 

This week sees the start of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ MyMedia project field trials. is an EU-funded collaborative research project studying recommender systems. In the past two years the project has developed state-of-the-art recommender algorithms and a public source .

In this final year, the project is running four separate fields trials which will evaluate the technology in different applications and environments. In the ´óÏó´«Ã½ trial the target application is web-based radio and TV services. The trial will be closed initially to give control over the assessment process which involves the quantitative comparison of several recommender algorithms.

MyMedia is a collaborative project involving ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D, , the , , and the Universities of and .

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is our latest prototype and a spin-off from our previous work on people’s music taste. It showcases some of the hottest bands and artists on the web, as identified by a number of independent sources, lets you listen to short clips and shows you where you can find that music on the ´óÏó´«Ã½.

We use data from a number of independent sources to determine what music is trending - the buzz about music on the internet, usually based on what’s being talked about, what’s being played, what’s being sold, what’s being written about and more. All our current sources have public APIs. From we use the , from we take their and from we create a combined chart from their .

We combine the source charts by creating an average position for each artist, giving each chart equal weight. This means that artists who appear in more than one chart are more likely to be higher in the combined chart. We display only the top 15 artists from each chart on the site, as individual sources and a chart. The combined and individual charts all have two view options, built from ´óÏó´«Ã½ data:

- This is the top 15 trending artists sorted by the number of plays that artist has had on the ´óÏó´«Ã½.

- This is the top 15 trending artists sliced by radio network, based on which network played that artist most, and then sorted by number of plays.

The refresh rate for each of these trend sources varies but we pull their data in every night then build our combined chart from the three sources. To import the "hottt" artist list from EchoNest we extended the library and the changes we made are available on GitHub . After this we try to match everything to IDs and link the artists to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Music pages and music clips from ´óÏó´«Ã½ programmes. Where the source data does not include a MusicBrainz ID we only have the artist name, so we use the and Ruby libraries to obtain the ID. But there is always the problem of how to disambiguate different artists with identical or similar names, such as Eagles, Eagles, and The Eagles, so in cases where we can’t uniquely identify an artist we don’t link to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ website or provide audio clips. Fortunately, this doesn’t occur too often.

All the ´óÏó´«Ã½ data that we use in the prototype (number of plays, links to /music pages etc.) is taken from the public data views on /music and /programmes. The music clips are taken from ´óÏó´«Ã½ broadcasts and for each artist we present a clip from the most recent of their songs played by ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio, along with a link to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ show it was taken from.

Developing this prototype also allowed us to try some features from the new HTML 5 standard. For audio playback we use the jQuery plug-in, which uses the element in browsers that support MP3 format audio (such as Chrome and Safari) or a Flash player in other browsers.

It’s a pretty straightforward prototype that looks useful to us and has an obvious purpose, showing you what the buzz is in music on the internet and showcasing the ´óÏó´«Ã½ content around that. Ultimately we have been thinking about doing more research into trending and data mining on the internet. If we do then it seems that we, as the ´óÏó´«Ã½, should be open and transparent about how we identify trends and in this particular case, we should focus on live, UK and new music.

The R&D department has two further roles advertised today, this time in our North Lab.  Closing date for both is Tuesday the 1st of June.



The ´óÏó´«Ã½ has a rich and successful history in the research and development in the field of audio in broadcasting over its long history from loudspeakers, microphones, studio design to signal processing technology and data-rate reduction. In 2010, the ´óÏó´«Ã½ believes the challenges of audio in broadcasting remain exciting and significant to our strategic future.

In the role of Lead Technologist, you will lead work specifically in the area of audio research and engineering. The initial focus areas are likely include periphony, spatial audio and ambisonics (including aspects such as recording, encoding, reproduction, and mixing), and the related areas of room acoustics (studio design for 3D, living room influence on 3D). Other related current research focuses include independent component analysis (audio "un-mixing") and music information retrieval (including automatic metadata generation).



This role is for a Senior Technologist working as part of a team investigating new approaches to TV production & media management which build on file-based recording and processing. Some aspects of the work will be to help formulate and develop new and innovative ideas in this field, but a significant part of the job will be to implement these in software in order to demonstrate and test their effectiveness in a production environment.

Although this particular post is focussed on developing innovative technical approaches for TV production & media management, a Senior Technologist may be expected to be involved in other areas as opportunities arise. This job specification outlines the breadth of work, some of the anticipated fields of expertise and indicates the level the role is required to work to, and the experience required. Individuals will not be expected to work in all skill areas to the highest of levels, but will be required to demonstrate a good range of skills, while specialising in one or two areas of technology research, innovation or project management.

All our current vacancies are listed on the R&D website careers page.

The Ingex project within ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D has created a unique tapeless multi-camera recording system, based on commodity hardware and open source software, usable in studios, outside broadcasts and archives.

We are now advertising two vacancies to join the Ingex Solutions team:

The Ingex Solutions team has the role of managing the ongoing "productisation", development and integration work required to turn the Ingex research work into a product that can be used across the global video production industry.

This may involve making the software available on new operating system platforms, making it work with new video capture hardware, making the system more functional and easier to use, integrating with other television production software, and more. In addition the team will promote the product, provide Ingex server rental and support services, and support Ingex users on a consultancy basis.

Just in case you haven't seen the blog and missed ... Its almost 5 years since Backstage to the public at by .

Since then a lot of things have happened and changed. Who would have thought the political parties would be shouting about open data in their manifestos? Anyhow, we're looking to build quite a mash-up but using you and your experiences as the data. I won't go into details right now but you can expect that the data will also be available for yourselves to build on too. So what're you waiting for? Fill in the forms and I look forward to seeing your answers aggregated together in the near future:

Remember it does not matter how small the memory for example a conversation with someone else on backstage at the first backstage meetup. Or large, say being on stage when lightning hit ally pally twice, we are interested.