Web Lecture Archiving System for Professional Society Meetings

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

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.