CREW

CREW and PAG - along with RACE, e-Dance and other Access Grid projects were demonstrated at the JISC Roadshow. Advanced Tools and Technologies for Collaborative Research 6 November 2008.

To demonstrate the multi-use the screenshot shows a small shuttle PC - the AGSC portable unit - running IOCOM, PAG as well as CREW on a single system.

For multi-core units the CPU loading of Flash was no problem.

Crew was demonstrated at the All Hands Meeting held in Edinburgh, September 2008.

This was a live demonstration but some screen shots are recorded here (click on any thumbnail to see a full screenshot).

1: Initial view showing list of events recorded in this environment.

2. After selecting the Research Methods Festival event the next screen shows the sessions available including headings/times/dates etc.

3. After selecting a particular session we can see the list of talks that occurred during that session.

4. Specifying a particular talk then gives information regarding that talk including the abstract, and of course a link to the video recording.

5. Screenshots of playing back the talk including multiple video streams and importantly a timelime for annotation events and slide changes etc.

Shown is the timeline that automatically creates events on major changes from the pc screen, as well as user inputted annotation recorded on a simple web form at the time of the recording.

6. Of course you can search for a speaker or event across all items

7. and find out where the event is/will be or was.

Important point is that all the data including the annotation is as automated as possible.

Aside: as a point of interest these screen-shots were never used as the live demonstration worked fine - as they all should Prior to the demonstration there was a keynote speaker, and using the conference wi-fi I ran through the demo to myself and captured a few key points - which explains the resolution as it was on my small laptop; the wifi also explains the buffering - but was very usable.

Saturday 20th Sep was Software Freedom Day (http://softwarefreedomday.org/) and the Manchester and Manchester Free Software hosted an open event at the Marbella cafe (http://manchester.fsuk.org/blog/).

The two servers for CREW and PAG were demonstrated through their all free system. Photo was taken by Lucy Bridges from MFS and shows the CREW annotated conference streaming system.

For the last four days we have been recording the “What Is?” sessions at the Research Methods Festival in Oxford.  The software has been working well, and the new H.261AS codec is certainly reducing the amount of disk space used (as well as keeping the quality good).

Some notes regarding the recording of sessions:

• Participants of less technical conferences tend not to bring their laptops into the sessions.  This means that we can’t rely on the Web-based annotation system to gather live annotations.  It may be useful to have digital pens (as are being used in other VRE-2 projects) to get people’s notes.  We will have to experiment and see if these can be used in this way.
• Most speakers are stressed enough having to do their presentations without having to learn to use our air mouse.  As a result, most choose not to.  Some use laser pointers, and so we may want to investigate the addition of a laser pointer detection system - see for example http://iit-iti.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/iit-publications-iti/docs/NRC-48283.pdf.
• We may want to (assuming infinite funds) obtain an automatic microphone mixer.  This would avoid the need to adjust the sound levels during the recording.  One can be obtained for about £100 more than the one we did buy.  Without this, the sound levels must be adjusted at the start of each speaker, and also at the start of each question.
• The speaker sometimes moves.  This cannot be predicted, so we either have to have a wide angle shot or move the camera throughout the presentation.  Both of these result in poorer quality video.  We may also therefore want to obtain motorized tripod heads such as these: http://trackercam.com/TCamWeb/motorpod.htm.  Along with the associated software, these can be used to track the speaker automatically (and therefore smoothly).  We would need to test how this works.
• The handheld microphone requires someone available to pass it around.  Someone else is needed to adjust the sound levels, and a third person to move the cameras.  This could be reduced by a) Having an automatic mixer as above;  b) using motorized tripod heads to track the microphone movement; c) having additional microphones dotted around the presentation room (this would depend on the size).

For remote recording and annotation without the internet - you need a Kit. This is the first version 1 of the CREW-Kit as used at the Eurographics UK Chapter conference (TP.CG’08 - Theory and Practice of Computer Graphics 2008) http://www.eguk.org.uk/TPCG08/index.html

The kit contains everything you need (excluding electricity) to record and annotate a presentation. It is also designed to be portable or at least luggable in a couple of rucksacks.

The event was the 26th annual conference for Eurographics UK and CREW recorded two of the keynote presentations.

Last week the 4th International Conference on e-Social Science took place at the Manchester Conference Centre with about 160 participants attending (see conference website). CREW was included with a paper on ‘User-centered development of a Virtual Research Environment to support Collaborative Research Events’ (see paper & presentation), presented in a user requirements and usability session, together with another VRE2 project, VERA.

Focussing on “user-designer relations, requirements work, support for communities, training and education requirements and models of access to resources”, the ‘Fostering e-Infrastructure: from user-designer relations to community engagement’ workshop, held Thursday 8 and Friday 9 May 2008 at the National e-Science Institute (NeSC) in Edinburgh, was a useful forum for exchange.

All talks have been well received (and can be found here), among them the presentation of the community engagement activities in the CREW VRE project, and led to a lively discussion covering topics like

• Where is ICT needed and what can I really do with having a new ICT/e-science environment?
• Does traditional user engagement (stuff around for a while in CSCW, HCI, PD, etc) work [best] in small groups, homogeneous groups, practically aligned interests, design of well described systems, serving well-definded purposes?
• How to open up eventually a space between Grid and Web 2.0?
• How do we operationalise the knowledge/ideas, we all gather(ed) in our work?
• Are funding programmes suitable the way they are and are there more synergies to be taken into account in, between and around projects?

In a news article entitled “At the cutting edge of educational technology” published on the JISC website on the 21st February, the CREW project was cited among others presented at the Lab Group event held in London this week:

The JISC funded Collaborative Research Events on the Web (CREW) project captures formal and informal information relating to research events, using a variety of approaches including social software, semantic technologies and recording tools. The hope is to enrich the events experience for the participating audience, but also extending opportunities for non-participants, thereby maximising investments within academic and research events.

Nikki Rogers, with colleagues from the ILRT, presented the CREW project among others we have running within the Institute at the moment. There was much interest and it will be interesting to see how the Lab Group providers themselves will present the video clips, photos and “interviews” recorded on the day via the ALT (Association for Learning Technology) website.

The User Requirements Report, the first official report of the CREW project, has been completed recently and is now available online on the Outputs page of this website (or here directly).

User engagement is an important asset for the development of the CREW VRE and ensures that the needs and requirements of the users, within their different research settings, are taken into account properly. In order to gather these requirements we planned and conducted workshops with each of our three user groups. These so called ‘User Days’ had the aim to get feedback on the development plans and ideas of the project team in the early stages of the project and also input towards the users’ real needs to support their research and work practices.

This report presents the results of these workshops and determines use cases for the further development of the CREW system. We would like to thank our user groups, Intute, the Scientific Visualization Groups and the Institute for Health Services (IHS) for their great commitment and support in these activities.

Yesterday I gave a presentation on “Developing Rich Internet Applications with Flex 2″ to a handful of developers at ILRT. Flex is a a framework for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) that are delivered through a Flash Player. The SDK provides compilers, debugger and a rich collection of ActionScript 3.0 components for user interface controls, layout, data models and communication.

You can see a flash version of the presentation below. Click the presentation to move to the next slide. There are also links to examples embedded in the presentation that are click-able.

There is also a PDF Version available.

I’m interested in using Flex for components of the CREW web application - for example, a photo viewer for snaps taken at a conference. Also, the video player used by CREW (created by Andrew Rowley) is written with ActionScript 2.0; it would be an interesting exercise to port the code to ActionScript 3.0 and take advantage of the Flex framework … well, interesting to me.