Speakers
Mr
Jeremy Herr
(University of Michigan)Dr
Steven Goldfarb
(University of Michigan)
Description
The size and geographical diversity of the LHC collaborations present new challenges
for communication and training. The Web Lecture Archive Project (WLAP), a joint
project between the University of Michigan and CERN Academic and Technical Training,
has been involved in recording, archiving and disseminating physics lectures and
software tutorials for CERN and the ATLAS Collaboration since 1999, when WLAP first
recorded the prestigious CERN Summer Student Lectures and made them available as
online Web Lectures. Ongoing demand for the recording of software tutorials, high
energy physics workshops and general interest talks has driven our team to automate
more and more of the recording, archiving, metadata tagging and publishing processes,
in order to make possible the large-scale recording and dissemination of lectures
with minimal human intervention. We have developed hardware and software solutions
to automate the encoding and compression of audio, video and slides; defined a
Lecture Object standard to facilitate the archiving and sharing of multimedia
presentations in an open fashion, worked on a robotics camera tracking system to
remove the need for a camera operator in tracking speakers, developed software to
harvest text from captured slides, associating the resulting metadata with relevant
sections within a lecture and radically improving search capabilities. Our group
regularly records ATLAS and University of Michigan events, hosting a significant
archive of hundreds of lectures for these communities, while simultaneously
benefiting from each recording as a test bed for newly developed technologies. We
present an overview of the project, with an emphasis on technologies currently in
development.
Primary authors
Prof.
Homer Alfred Neal
(University of Michigan)
Mr
Jeremy Herr
(University of Michigan)
Dr
Mick Storr
(CERN HR)
Dr
Steven Goldfarb
(University of Michigan)
