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Another quiet week with a few people on leave, and the UX team in Salford working on projects with Vicky. Chris L did a fair bit of research on the news linking prototype, along with Duncan. They built an early stage prototype which finds opinion and editorial pieces from around the web related to the top stories of the day on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News bulletins, using RSS, screen-scraping and Solr. Chris and Yves also ran a successful "machine learning lunch" with Libby and Chris Newell from the R&D South Lab. Yves discussed the ABC-IP project we're doing with SME but spent most of his week working on the first deliverable for the ABC-IP project, describing all data sources that will be used in the project.

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Room 101 was quiet this week as the summer holidays took hold, but those in the office made progress on a number of projects.

Yves has been deriving statistics and graphs from the World Service archive. There's not much in the way of metadata for these audio files, so he's been writing a Python library for extracting keywords from recorded speech, using as a backend, a language model based on the , and the , and matching the results against a set of tags used by the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ to describe programmes. He is currently running it on a part of the World Service archive to evaluate its results.

He has also been liaising with the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Pronunciation Unit, which has a massive database spanning 80 years of proper names (places and people, mainly) with associated pronunciation. He met with and is planning our first deliverable within the ABC-IP project - a data availability report.

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This week we welcomed Yves Raimond to the team, he previously worked in the /programmes team and has joined us to principally work on a -funded project to mine the World Service audio archive. In his first week he's been getting to grips with the archive; deriving some statistics from it, experimenting with for automated speech recognition and liaising with others in R&D and companies providing commercial speech to text solutions. He's currently evaluating the results.

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Maybe it's the time of year or maybe it's stage we are at in our projects, but the week has been dominated by report writing, presentations and planning. Coding and designing seem to have taken a back seat for once. The News Linking team presented the results of their analysis phase, firstly to the team (where they got a grilling) and secondly to News and Knowledge. It has been really successful so far and they've generated some useful insights, a supporting report, a tech note and some fine looking equations; not bad for a months work. The focus is now shifting to the prototypes they're going to create in the next phase of work which runs to the end of September.

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In the Spring of 2011 ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D's User Experience Design team undertook a pilot collaboration with the in London.

For one month students from the Innovation Design Engineering and History of Design courses worked with ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D staff members to produce concepts and prototypes for future development.ÌýThe topics covered included intergenerational content, cross device experiences and interaction in the future connected home.

Below is a short video about the project which gives a flavour of the kind of work done. You can read more about the collaborationÌýitself in a previous blog post.

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Over the next few months we will be developing a couple of the concepts through to working prototypes for testing and evaluation.

Both the Kinaesthetic Broadcasting & Media Device concept and the Flow Experience: Ambient Media idea will be developed further by ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D engineers in conjunction with the RCA and then assessed in our dedicated User Testing Laboratory at Dock House in MediaCityUK.

In due course we'll let you know how we get on with testing and what the next steps are for these two intriguing new concepts.

At the start of the week the News Linking team invited a couple of experts in to discuss how social media could play a part in increasing the amount of external linking we could do on News and more generally across the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ. Chris G was up to his ears in teleconferences, while Tristan slaved away editing an EU document. Struggling to keep up with the pace, Theo booked himself in for a fish pedicure.

With Vicky now based in R&D Media City Theo, Joanne and Nina Monet (from News) decamped there for the second half of the week to work on the News Companion prototypes. It was a great opportunity to check out the amazing new R&D North Lab. It must be a productive environment because by the end of the first day they had the prototype ready for testing.

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