Web Lecture Archiving System for Professional Society Meetings

该项目的重点是开发一种设备，以便能够在专业学会会议环境中对讲座进行录音，并开发标准化的软件体系结构，以便能够在万维网上对这些讲座进行编目和回放，使世界各地的机构和个人能够永久使用这些讲座。多年来，通过网络捕获、存档和交付演示文稿已成为一项众所周知、可靠和有用的技术。密歇根大学ATLAS项目在这一领域一直处于领先地位，已经编制了300多场讲座和讲座的档案，面向在日内瓦参加著名的CERN暑期学生计划的本科生，也用于CERN ATLAS实验的软件应用培训。此外，在过去两年中，美国物理学会在选定的会议上使用了网络演讲捕获，包括2002年9月的一次会议，捕获和发布过程由APS和密歇根大学联合完成。该项目正在寻求一个真正的机会，以促进技术在这一重要领域的使用，使无法出席会议但仍对某些会议过程非常感兴趣的教职员工和其他专业人员可以使用会议演示文稿。对于这个感兴趣但在家里的小组中的每个人来说，可能会有一组不同的非常感兴趣的演讲，因此，这一努力正朝着允许这些人坐在他们的计算机前、调出会议议程并查看几分钟前发生的演讲的目标而努力。他们将体验一流的音频和良好的视频，并可以访问与视频同步播放的所有幻灯片，并可以选择下载相关的支持文件。这一愿景可以远远扩展到专业协会会议之外，产生巨大的影响。图书馆可以存放数字讲座档案，其中包括从政府议事程序到研讨会和关于任何主题的讲座的各种讲座。学生们可以观看一些最伟大的科学思想家就当前或历史上感兴趣的主题所做的演讲。业界肯定会对用于培训、研讨会和会议的设备感兴趣。该项目正在应对在实现上述愿景之前必须解决的几个挑战。目前的记录方法是人力密集型的，以至于记录多个会议对于大多数组织来说是不可行的。现有的软件不够健壮。不存在允许分享讲座或保证十年后讲座可获得性的标准。PI团队正在开发针对每个问题的解决方案。第一步是使用强大和用户友好的硬件设备，消除廉价捕获和分析讲座中的视频、音频和幻灯片的技术障碍。这样的设备必须是一种紧凑的硬件，可以分发给未经培训的个人，甚至是会议主席，以便能够捕获讲座，无论演讲是以什么形式呈现的，并使用无线传输将其自动发布到会议中心服务器，该服务器随后将演讲发布到网络上。另一个必要的步骤是制定一个标准，用来确保讲座的长期可获得性，无论商业套餐可能发生什么变化，并保证不同学科和社会的讲座可以共享。第三个需要的创新是通过自动化技术从每堂课中提取显着改进的元数据。将从讲座音轨中提取的关键字存档的先进能力将有助于从档案中产生更高程度的知识输出。实现这些目标将导致一种易于使用、高度有效的讲座存档方法。每堂课都将作为代表讲座视频、音频、幻灯片和有价值的元数据的“讲座对象”存档。

This project is focusing on the development of a device to permit the recording of lectures in the environment of professional society meetings, and the standardized software architecture that will permit the cataloging and playback of these lectures on the world wide web, making them permanently available to institutions and individuals around the world. Over the years the capture, archiving and delivery of presentations via the web has become a technology that is well understood, reliable and useful. The University of Michigan ATLAS Project has been a leader in this area and has already compiled an archive of over 300 lectures and talks, directed at undergraduates who participate in the prestigious CERN Summer Student Program in Geneva, and also used for software application training in the ATLAS Experiment at CERN. In addition, the American Physical Society has utilized web lecture capture for selected conferences over the past two years, including a conference in September, 2002, where the capture and publishing process was done jointly by the APS and the University of Michigan. This project is pursuing a real opportunity to advance the use of technology in this important area of making conference presentations available to faculty and other professionals that are unable to attend the conference but are still very interested in some of the proceedings. For each person in this interested-but-at-home group, there is likely to be a different set of talks of keen interest, thus this effort is working towards the goal of allowing such persons to sit at their computers, pull up the agenda for the conference, and view talks that have occurred minutes before. They would experience superb audio, good video and have access to all slides shown in synchronization with video, with the option of downloading relevant supporting documents. This vision can be extended well beyond professional society meetings, with enormous impact. Libraries could house digital lecture archives containing lectures ranging from government proceedings to seminars and lectures on any number of topics. Students could view lectures given by some of the greatest scientific minds on topics of current or historical interest. Industry would definitely be interested in the device for training, workshops, and conferences. This project is working on several challenges that must be addressed before the above vision can be realized. Current recording approaches are so manpower intensive that recording multiple sessions is not feasible for most organizations. Existing software is not sufficiently robust. Standards do not exist that would permit the sharing of lectures or in guaranteeing their accessibility a decade from now. The PI team is developing solutions to each of these problems. The first step is elimination of the technical barriers to the inexpensive capture and analysis of the video, audio, and slides from a lecture, using a robust and user-friendly hardware device. Such a device must be a compact piece of hardware that can be distributed to untrained individuals, even session chairs, to permit the capture of lectures, regardless of the format in which they were presented, and that automatically publish them using wireless transmission to a conference center server that would then post the talks on the web. Another needed step is the development of a standard which could be used to insure the long term availability of the lectures, regardless of what changes may occur in commercial packages, and to guarantee that talks across different disciplines and societies could be shared. A third needed innovation is a significantly improved meta-data extraction from each lecture through automated techniques. Advanced capabilities to archive keywords extracted from the audio track of a lecture would help to produce a significantly higher degree of knowledge output from the archives. Accomplishing these goals would result in an easy-to-use, highly effective method of archiving lectures. Each lecture would be archived as a "lecture object" representing the lecture video, audio, slides, and valuable metadata.