CREW

There have been a few review sessions for CREW and other VRE projects.

A notable activity was from Paul Miller who reviewed by doing. On the 12th October 2009 CREW Recorded Paul Miller, The Cloudofdata “Being at the Interface” 2-3pm Room 1.10, Kilburn Building, The University of Manchester. From the website Paul Miller works at the interface between the worlds of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web, providing the insights that enable you to exploit the next wave as we approach the World Wide Database. Not directly related to SIGGRAPH but an interesting aside.

This was added as part of the University of Manchester SIGGRAPH Professional Chapter events and is replayable from here.

Gas Street Works are filming the CREW project (VRE2 Programme) today.

CREW being used at the UoM HS research meeting 10th March 2009

Items:

• Far left Meik Poschen is adding live annotation; comments and slide captions on his iPhone (VPN connection to the wi-fi system)
• Left laptop is connected by a cable to the front computer recording the projected video stream – ppt and mouse movements etc. Controlled by Andrew Rowley.
• This laptop is also connected to the wireless mic (silver and black boxes on top of each other). This records the audio. The speaker is on the front desk and captures sound from a wide range of angles.
• Camera on tripod is also connected to the left laptop and is recording the video view of the speaker. Only one camera is being used in this case.
• My laptop, a slow Dell, on the right is just annotating the event – and is using a simple wi-fi connection. The screen shows the simple and easy to use (large buttons) interface lauchable from any browser, for audience live annotation.
• Live annotation is also being recorded from the left laptop – also wi-fi connected.

The complete setup took about 20-25 mins to fix and test for this single camera system. Also, this version of the CREW kit is relatively portable as shown by Meik Poschen – who can hold it easily in one hand (even one finger) – laptops separate but there was room in the rucksack.

There was minimal interference with the host, speaker or audience – and hopefully all the extra information results in useful research-connections. And slightly quicker to pack away.

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 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?

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.