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A couple of months ago ´óÏó´«Ã½ Research and Development’s North Lab moved into its new home at MediaCity UK in Salford.

The old base at Oxford Road in Manchester had been home for a good few years for some so, while excited about our shiny new facilities, it was with fondness and some sadness that we bid the Outside Broadcast building, ‘round the back, in the carpark, goodbye.

Below is a short film about the last days of Oxford Road and the start of our new working lives in Salford.

Dock House is already the home to some great work. Our collaboration with the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Orchestra, the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Philharmonic Maestro, was a big hit with visitors to the Manchester International Festival. Our new Audio research Partnership launched with a decidedly big bang a few weeks back.

If you want to learn more about ´óÏó´«Ã½ Research & Development's presence in the North, fellow R&D-er Tony Churnside has put together a whistlestop tour of the new lab.

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On Thursday (14th July) Peter Brightwell and I had the honour of representing ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D at an evening reception at Buckingham Palace for winners of the 2011 Queen's Award. We were there following the announcement that ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D had won an award for the Piero sports graphics system. There were several hundred guests, representing the 156 companies that won awards across the categories of Innovation (in which we were one of the 44 winners), International Trade (102 winners), and Sustainable Development (10 winners). These are highly prestigious awards given for outstanding achievement by UK businesses; to win an award in the Innovation category we had to demonstrate that Piero was both highly technically innovative and had been a significant commercial success.

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This week we welcome Rachel to our team. Coming from the , she will be staying with us for two weeks and has been . Daynotes... Impressive.

After our weekly meeting on Thursday, Rachel was joined by some colleagues from talking about sentiment analysis of tweets (which turns out to be hard, as we would expect) and from the who showed us some , including one over a 3D map of London.

The RadioTAG team worked hard this week, with a number of runs though final design of the app site, and a number of presentations (of RadioTAG and VIS) to radio colleagues and other companies, in preparation for our user research. There was also a first: ChrisL and Kat registered a a radio with one of our online accounts.

Theo and ChrisN focused most of their week on The Programme List - finishing the UX revisions so we can complete this iteration of development and start testing with users next week. ChrisN, Theo writes "has worked wonders on the backend - packaging the server requests to improve UI response time and a whole host of small fixes. We've been 'high-fiving' as we clear the Agile Zen backlog."

The news linking team was immersed in numbers and formulas for most of the week: ChrisL, Duncan and Olivier were joined in animated discussions by Sean in looking for appropriate metrics to measure the rate at which visitors of the News site click on external link. We eventually settled on, and started using, a measure of Click-Through rate, and Chris built a mathematical model on which we can start basing our "what if" scenarios. Joanne, Olivier and Akua also interviewed two people from the news team: Jonathan with whom we learned a lot about news and blog culture at the ´óÏó´«Ã½, and Clare, who gave us a lot of interesting information about her role as a Link Journalist - where she rounds up articles found on the web specifically researching links to good articles to be put into her daily news roundup.

The news companion project also made some progress, mostly through researching market. Kat noted why "companions" is our new favoured word for second screen devices. Second screen suggests they are the inferior and less important screen, whereas we are thinking of them as the controllers of primary content, rather than simply being complementary.

Links of the week:

• The (according to Kat)
• and
• James Coglan's excellent 3-part series on , the final part of which was posted this week.
• Two (funny, thought-provoking) pieces on the changing culture of online news: and

Andrew Murphy, Justin Mitchell and Martin Thorp (from left to right) with the transmit antenna above them

On 7 July 2011 we began transmissions of DVB-T2-Lite from the roof of ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D’s South Lab oppositeÌý. As DVB-T2 is widespread throughout the UK, you might wonder what’s unusual about this? Well, the DVB-T2 specification has just been updated with a new profile which we are evaluating. This marks the start of a thorough technical evaluation by us in ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D and is especially exciting because the specification that defines the format of the signals to be transmitted has only just been approved as standard by theÌýÌýSteering board! Just as with the existing profile - which went on to become 'Freeview HD' in the UK - we are pleased to be there from day one with transmitter (modulator) and receiver (demodulator) designs that we can use to validate the standard and also to licence to manufacturers interested in developing products for mobile applications.

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On Friday 8th July the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Audio Research Partnership launched with a flourish at MediaCity UK in Salford.

In a feature packed day we had inspiring keynote talks from Tim Davie, the head of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Audio and Music, the Vice Chancellors from the universities of Salford and Surrey, and ´óÏó´«Ã½ Research & Development’s General Manager, Steven Baily.

We also had a host of demonstrations and presentations on current audio research from ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D and our academic partners as well as a fascinating panel discussion about the future of audio production. The day was topped off with a visit to the Music Box installations at the Manchester International Festival and a tour around ´óÏó´«Ã½ Research & Development’s new lab at MediaCity UK.

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ Audio Research Partnership is a new model of working for the ´óÏó´«Ã½. Structured collaboration with our academic partners aims to produce tangible benefits for audio industries. It was appropriate that such a forward looking initiative launched with a suitably fresh and inspiring event.ÌýBelow is a video of some the day’s highlights.

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We are currently looking to recruit a senior audio leader to lead the Audio Research Partnership and ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D's audio team. Applicants should apply via the .ÌýThe advert is open until Tuesday 30th August and you can find out more about the post in a previous entry on this blog.

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Editor's note: ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D, Salford University and the British Science Association (BSA) launched Musical Moods in March 2011 during the BSA‘s National Science and Engineering Week. As of July 2011 over 15,000 people had taken part and had listened to over 56,000 theme tunes. In this blog post, Prof. Trevor Cox of the University of Salford and Sam Davies, Research & Development Engineer at ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D analyse some of the results collected so far and discuss future plans for this huge collection of data - KG

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Further to the announcement at the Audio Research Partnership launch event that ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D wants to recruit a senior audio leader, the . I encourage applications from anyone who has a strong track record of innovations in audio and has significant experience of leading audio R&D teams.Ìý This a very exciting opportunity to lead both the Audio Research Partnership and ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D's audio team, and to play an important role in the leadership team of our new lab at MediaCityUK, Salford. The closing date is 30th August.

Jo and Theo began the week by wrapping work up with Vicky, ready for her move to Salford. We had lots of visitors - the design team shared their thinking with Ben G Ìý- News Creative Director – to see how our ideas matched his interests and requirements. ÌýUlyssa M came in to look at our ideas and give us a steer from a Dual Screen Incubation point of view, while Kat arranged for Silver O came in to talk us through his work on domain modelling News and Sport. Chris L has a very good meeting with Steve J from R&D to discuss Universal Control API, synchronisation, and LIMO. I meet with universities and industrial colleagues to discuss Web Science.

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This week in Prototyping...

The News linking team (Olivier, Chris L, Duncan and Joanne) are in data analysis mode. Earlier in the week Olivier was wading through screenfuls of SQL consoles and python scripts but managing to find a few interesting trends in the logs: some did not quite meet Chris' rigorous sense of statistical analysis, but others gave us a number of insights worth pursuing or validating - Olivier says "What's interesting here is that we are not only validating a few things we already suspected about how people navigate between news stories and news media, we are also refining a few metrics for links efficacy and popularity". Joanne unearthed a treasure trove of research papers on the topic. Any respectable paper MUST, apparently, include complicated-looking mathematical formulas which could more easily be explained in prose. And Chris and Duncan are now scraping pages for the things that aren't in the logs and looking at the correlations between visits, page length and click-throughs.

The news companion team (Vicky, Kat, Theo, Sean, Chris N) are in the research and idea development phase, moving on from our original idea and working closely with News to widen the scope and come up with a few possible directions. Nina from the News design team is spending a couple of days a week sitting with us. They've been diving into the relevant user research and are looking at personalisation, bubbles, dual screens, saving for later, serendipity and the completability of news.

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Today (8th July), we are holding a launch event for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Audio Research Partnership at the ´óÏó´«Ã½â€™s new buildings at MediaCityUK in Salford. This marks the culmination of over a year of discussions and meetings between ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D and the UK’s top universities in audio and audio-visual research. We will be working with five world-leading university partners, selected for their relevance to ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D’s current audio ambitions. Our primary partners will be Surrey University for audio-visual research and Salford University for acoustics research. We will also be working closely with Southampton, Queen Mary, University of London, and York. The ´óÏó´«Ã½ has committed to the partnership for at least five years.Ìý The ´óÏó´«Ã½â€™s Head of Audio and Music, Tim Davie, will formally launch the partnership in front of an audience of invitees from industry and academia, and the event will then provide a networking opportunity with some demos and posters from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and its new partners.

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A Soundfield(registered trade mark) microphone being used for capturing audio for ´óÏó´«Ã½ Research & Development experiments with Ambisonics

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A few of us are a little shocked by how fast last week passed. So shocked, in fact, I'm only just updating our weeknotes now.

Monday saw Tristan and Chris N making the final changes to Programme List - as Watch Later is now called - before it is sent round the team for testing. Chris N also gets started on the next stage of LIMO work for P2P-Next, and catches up with the work our partners at Norut are doing.

With Watch Later and RadioTAG wrapping up, most of the team are now starting work on projects with News. Olivier, Joanne, Vicky, Tristan and I are going through all the research we can find, with Chris L analysing and visualising the data samples sent from the news online team. A few passionate discussions about statistics have started to delve into quantum physics territory, which Olivier assures me is the right track.

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As you might have heard our North Lab team have just moved into their new home at MediaCity:UK on Salford Quays, leaving at last the outside broadcast shed at the back of the Manchester Oxford Road studios.Ìý The new environment is offering a huge array of new opportunities, not least the chance to make the best of our brand-new high capacity infrastructure in the lab.

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Dock House at MediaCity:UK, home of ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D North Lab

That's where you may be able to help- we are still looking for a top flight imaginative creative sysadmin to help us push the very limits of what a modern R&D network can be.Ìý We need someone with an intimate familiarity with the guts of Linux of multiple flavours.Ìý Someone with an almost subconcious understanding of the TCP/IP stack, of ethernet and fibrechannel,Ìý and of the challenges around using such technologies to support storage, communications and software repository applications.Ìý And someone who can take this implicit knack, and from it generate experimental spins on the services, systems and capabilities we can give to staff working at the very edge of media technology.Ìý This is not a job tinkering on the edges of the huge ´óÏó´«Ã½ enterprise infrastructure - R&D has its own space, its own network, fully connected between our labs, and this job is to help us make the most of this fabulous resource.

Applications are now until the 13th of July, so please do let us know if you're ready for this challenge.