Alex Rawcliffe

I joined BBC R&D in September 2010 after graduating from the University of Oxford with an MEng in Engineering Science. I already had a keen interest in broadcast and media technology: Alongside studying for my course I worked in local radio, directed various technical theatre projects and spent some time as a freelance video producer. Coming to R&D offered a great opportunity to combine my practical and academic skills.

I undertook my first project in our west London lab, Centre House, joining the Archives Research group. Broadly speaking, R&D’s work in this area focuses on investigating how to ‘digitise’ and preserve historical broadcast content at its best, as well as developing technologies to make the corporation’s vast content library more accessible to the public and programme makers.

I worked in the ‘capture and preservation’ area, developing signal processing algorithms to automate a quality assessment process being undertaken on several hundred thousand hours of video. Achieving this required the use of a wide range of signal processing techniques, statistics and information theory, not to mention considerable low level C++ development. The technology is still being refined, and I am hoping to publish this work in the near future.

I’m now based at the BBC’s new MediaCityUK complex in Salford, undertaking my second project as part of our User Experience and Accessibility group. This involves working closely with R&D’s team of behavioural scientists and computer interaction specialists to prototype and test technologies which we hope will enhance the accessibility of our broadcast content. My work to date has included designing a voice operated TV remote, and developing a piece of hardware to provide tactile, kinaesthetic, information to accompany ‘traditional’ television content. Once again, many skills were required to achieve this: Software development in various languages, such as Java, Python and PHP, as well as electronic design. Alongside project work, I’ve also been helping to specify some of the equipment and infrastructure in our new lab space at MediaCityUK.

Throughout both of my projects, I’ve been well supported by the excellent training provided by R&D. This has included six weeks of broadcast technology courses, as well as shorter modules on software development and design. Placed alongside on-the-job training from some world-class engineers, I really feel I’ve continued to learn over the last year! In the longer term, I am also working towards gaining chartered engineer status.

Outside project work, I’ve had many other interesting opportunities to work with other members of the department and wider corporation. Some of my personal highlights over the last year include field testing (in the literal sense) a prototype TV production system at a music festival, representing the corporation at careers and educational events, and leading a team in a BBC-wide software development competition.

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