For the past two years, our team has been involved in the W3C audio activity, participating in an effort to bring open, standard technology to process and synthesise audio on the web.
With recent progress on draft specifications and early implementations, we felt it was time to start playing with the emerging APIs. There were already many demos showing what can be done with the now-defunct Audio Data API as well as the proposed MediaStream Processing API and Web Audio API, yet we felt there was room for us to build something which would not only help show the capabilities of these APIs, but could also feed into the standardisation work by revealing gaps in features, by gathering impressions of working on some less-used sections of the specs, and perhaps even by stretching the implementations enough to raise flags about performance.
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We've been doing some interesting UX research for ABC-IP (Automatic Broadcast Interlinking Project) into alternative approaches to publishing large programme archives. Making archives available online is a costly business that typically involves high degrees of curation by skilled editorial staff. As part of the ABC-IP project we're looking at whether we could publish large archives with less editorial effort by using computer processing and crowd sourcing techniques. We've been using the large World Service radio archive as a test case.
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Despite (or maybe because of) the short week, we're deep in the trenches at the moment, as some of our research draws to a close whilst other projects get almost enough clarity to start properly. Duncan continued work with the TV Whitespace project - working on streamlining the codebase, moving the demonstrator to new servers, and updating the dataset. Chris Newell has written a blog post about our client-side recommender module which we will be using to explore interactive recommender systems later in the year. And Andrew continued work on the ABC-IP tagging experiment - it's almost ready for the trial to begin - while he and others have also been working out the features that the public prototype will have.
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