大象传媒

From听听Chris Newell

The has ended with the publication of the final field trial reports.

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The MyMedia website has all the project publications and trial results available.

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This EC-funded project studied recommender systems, developing state-of-the-art recommender algorithms and a . In the final year, the project ran four individual fields trials to evaluate the technology in different applications and environments.

In the 大象传媒 field trial the target application was web-based radio and TV catchup services. The describes the implementation of the 大象传媒 trial, the analysis of the results and the conclusions that followed. MyMedia project partners were 大象传媒 R&D, BT Research, the European Microsoft Innovation Center, Microg茅nesis, Novay and the Universities of Eindhoven and Hildesheim.

Over on the Radio Blog our colleagues in the Audio & Music department (A&M to friends) and the related Technology department areas have been posting about a few R&D type activities they have been working on in the domain of Surround Sound.听 You may recall that the R&D dept have been doing some pretty advanced work on periphony and ambisonics- in the related field of Surround Sound Alan Ogilvie and Simon Tuff have been making engineering advances for our own streaming services, which they talk about in a couple of posts over yonder....

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Thanks to Steve Bowbrick for flagging this for us.

Lots happening this week, with some projects entering their closing stages and new ideas & workstreams springing up left, right and centre. Monday begins with George in a telco, in preparation for a trip to Brussels to answer questions from the Commission about a collaborative project that's got through to the next stage of the process. There's a useful RadioDNS catch up with various team members to discuss how to get our trial into alpha testing. George & Chris G hunker down to plot a path for the next 3 months, and Tris delves into some scoping about Sherlock. Duncan's writing up some control research he did with a Microsoft Kinect.

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Over at the Backstage Blog Ian Forrester has posted the last entry before the blog is mothballed and all entries in that area appear here, or on the Internet Blog.听 As Ian makes clear it's been a tremendously exciting, inspiring and innovative proces, and we've reached a time for transition.

In the next few weeks we'll be working hard to make the long term community support elements of Backstage into a more sustainable and more broadbased effort.听 We're sorry we can't say more just yet, but just as Backstage was the work of many people, so is this new phase, and we need a little more time to get everyone together.

Until then we'll let the estimable Mr Forrester have the last word:

"So in Backstage fashion, thanks for all the tags... you were all truly inspiring and together we inspired."

In the final film about the Super Hi Vision trials in TC Zero we have explored in depth the technologies used to transmit the huge amounts of data generated over the internet between London and Tokyo.听 In some regards this was the most critical part of the tests, and represented a genuinely new acheivement for us in terms of the volume of data moved.听 It's also an area where we can expect innovations made today to have impact in the very near future, as demand for online content races ahead, and the bandwidth demands can potentially outstrip supply very quickly.

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In this film John Zubrzycki and Chris Chambers describe the techniques used in the tests, and their potential future use for live events in the coming months and years.

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On Monday, Tristan gets to help me听complete our contribution to an EU project submission. Vicky's听preparing a presentation of Autumnwatch trial and findings to show various UX&D people and others who are interested in developing second screen experiences. She's working with听Chris and Tristan, about potential next steps for second screen to begin working out which projects could have most impact, and is working on a brief for ethnographic research and reviewing some previous papers written on the subject. Olivier's on the 大象传媒 Upfront induction, which apparently turned out to be quite good - he was impressed that the 大象传媒 values聛 aren't entirely a load of meaningless听fluff. The rest of his time is/was spent meeting people from every corner of the 大象传媒, learning about what they do and how we can better use/contribute to web standards.听

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That first week back at school feeling has gone and it's back to business as usual in the office. Lots of activity closing off projects, documentation and scoping and planning the next set of projects for this quarter. On Monday, Sean shows the work we have been doing on the Firehose to the London Ruby User Group (LRUG). Here's the and the . The rest of the week he's head down writing up technical documentation for this phase of the project while Kat writes up the research findings.

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Well, I'm back in the office for the first time in 2011 along with about half the team. The morning stand-up lasts much longer than normal because we can't quite remember what we were all doing. Olivier joins the team this week, he's a "Senior Technologist, Internet Standards" and will be the 大象传媒's new W3C rep, and much of his first week was dedicated to joining the team, the 大象传媒 and indeed, the country. Chris L is here for a meeting on Thursday, and he's joining the engineering team later this month.

We review our upcoming projects, we're full up till the end of January. George discovers Kat's wiki page on literary theory. Sean gets a little annoyed about Derrida. I just about finish off my first tech note for about 10 years. And Thursday brings banana cake baked by Akua.

We meet about our position paper for the upcoming where we agree on a solid basis for our engagement. Olivier pulls this paper together and its submitted in plenty of time for the deadline on Friday. Kat and I talk about TV scrobbling and personal data stores for a possible new commission and we continue to research "lifelogging" and data privacy.

Sean turns the Firehose off. We had it connected for 50 days and have stored the equivalent of about 10TB of uncompressed tweets, that's around 5 and a half billion in total, 110 million every day. As Sean says - "Once we've done a thorough scan of all the data we'll get more accurate figures which I'm sure you'll be able to use to advantage in a range of social situations.". Now we're writing up the project.

Mark's been thinking about how to wrap up his Audio Synchronisation project and also starting some research for the Dashboard. When Paul returns he's researching CDNs for the same project.

After five great years the servers are finally powering down on the inspiring project that was .听 As a way to look back on the journey we commisioned to create an of the whole project.

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The 大象传媒 Backstage ebook- a celebration of five years of this groundbreaking project. Design by Nicola Rowlands

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Suw, editor Jim McClennan and the designer have put together an amazing piece of work which is an excellent introduction to the Backstage phenomena, and also serves as a fitting tribute to the efforts of the many staff and friends of the project over the last half decade.

Hat tip to all our colleagues who worked on this book and the project long term, not least Brendan Crowther and most recently, and down the years such luminaries as Jem Stone, Ben Metcalfe, Tom Loosemore, Matt locke, Matt Cashmore, Rain Ashford and many more.

The data sets and license for Backstage remain active and are being migrated into a centrally managed public facing developer documentation area- it's a transition from experimental to "business as usual" that represents the maturation of the Backstage ideal.听 The work of Backstage will live on, and on this blog we welcome feedback on the five years of the project, and on developments in this area in the future.听 The 大象传媒 Internet Blog will also be available for discussion of the 大象传媒's open data policy.

UPDATE:

Jemima Kiss has a on the about the end of Backstage which includes quotes from an interview with Ian and Adrian Woolard.

It's always very nice to see our work recognised on other sites, so we were delighted to notice during the festivities of New Year's Eve that published a online.听 The article points to the collection of technical documents that we originally published (for five shillings a pop!) from the 1960s to the 1980s.听

We actually have a large collection of digitised documents available for download, and the process of digitising and OCRing them is ongoing- our ultimate aim is to have these documents available digitally and searchable on the open internet, and to be a useful resource for all our visitors.听 In the next few weeks I'll see if we can get a post from our outstanding librarian about the project and the gems we're uncovering.