David Lewis

I joined the R&D trainee technologist scheme in September 2009 and have just completed my two years and three projects with a successful promotion to technologist.

My first project placement was Click My e-Director 2012 within the Production Magic section. Within a couple of weeks, I’d taken over from another trainee and gained responsibility for an RFID tracking system and RC car. The car was used to test if the tracking system was capable of following an athlete at speed without having an Olympic sprinter on call. Using existing R&D Click image tracking technology and a 3D environment loaded with the tracking system results, I produced a video overlay similar to post-match football analysis to show off the results.

My second project was with the Click mobile team looking at accessibility, media synchronisation and remote control. I had the opportunity to develop applications for iOS and Android mobiles as well as an AJAX web application. These demo applications have been used to show the potential future of TV and mobile interaction to others in the department and the wider BBC.

My final project was with the Archives Research section looking at multimedia classification. I used my software development skills to turn a prototype image analysis system running in Matlab into a scale-able system using a multi-threaded C++ application running on a compute cluster. This development work greatly improved my C++ and Linux scripting skills as well as introducing me to parallelism and clusters. The new image analysis system will allow other researchers to quickly process thousands of hours of video to help identify the links between programmes and viewer emotions.

Throughout all of my projects, I’ve had support from industry experts who are always happy to explain ideas and discuss problems. I’ve had the freedom to develop my own ideas and explore the potential for related ideas. I’ve also been able to contribute to other projects and events outside my own work areas. I’ve even helped Click create art with other trainees outside of work time.

For my final three month placement outside of R&D, I’ve joined BBC News Click School Report. The School Report team provide support for teachers to teach secondary school pupils basic journalism skills. After only two weeks I’ve already contributed several ideas to the team and developed a web page to be used as a teaching resource. I’m confident that for the next few months I’ll be able to add my skills brought from R&D to a less technical area of the BBC. I’m sure I’ll also pick up some experience of the educate part of the “inform, educate and entertain” BBC mission statement.

When I get back to R&D, I’ll be working on how we use the graphical capabilities of the hardware being built into new set-top boxes. This should be a really exciting project to work on with some great potential applications.

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