ShapeShiftedTV Tutorial
Short autobiographies of the people who delivered the tutorial:
Dr. Doug Williams leads the project NM2 (New Media, New Millennium) which is part funded by the EU. Doug works for BT, one of the world's leading providers of communications solutions serving customers in Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific, as a Project Director in the Broadband Applications Research Centre. For the last six years he has taken a special interest in the emergence of convergent forms of media and has built many relationships with the media production industry. Pragmatic, and increasingly thick skinned, Doug is passionate about the responsibility we have to make research relevant and understandable and aligned to the market goals not technical ones. Prior to leading the NM2 project Doug worked for 5 years on the creation of marketable propositions for research outputs first as an Innovation Consultant working with the IP & New Media sales team and then by leading a team of marketing professional in BT's research labs. Before his research career focused on the media, Doug was a leading researcher in optical fibre design, a topic in which he holds a PhD and on which he has published widely. He regards his key skills as 'seeing the big picture' and matching technology-based skills to emergent market opportunities. He is simple, but he isn't stupid. contact information
Dr. Andra Leurdijk is Senior Researcher and Consultant at TNO Information and Communication Technology, Amsterdam. She holds an MA in Political Sciences and a PhD in Communication Studies, both from the University of Amsterdam. Previously she worked at the Media Department of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, at a Media and Internet Research & Consultancy Company (ACS-i), the Communication Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam and the School for Journalism in Zwolle. Her specialisations are policy and innovation in the fields of (digital) broadcasting and new media. She works as a researcher and consultant and also publishes extensively on these subjects. She is currently involved in two European funded FP6 programmes: NM2 (New Media, New Millennium) and Citizen Media, and in several projects for the Dutch Government and public broadcasters concerning convergence and media policies. In these projects TNO is responsible for user evaluations and for investigating markets and business models for ShapeShifted TV, user generated media and interactive media in general, both in the commercial and public domain. contact information
Maureen Thomas (Writer/Director/ Developer/Dramaturge) is a Senior Research Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge. From 1993 – 1998 she was a Head Tutor at the National Film and Television School, UK (from 1986-1993 a visiting tutor), where, as well as developing productions across fiction, documentary and animation, she led the NFTS’ successful Digital and Interactive Studio initiative, funded in 1996 through the Department of Trade and Industry, UK, Technology Foresight Challenge. Maureen is Visiting Professor in Narrativity and Interactivity at the Norwegian Film SchooI, Helsinki, and a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Digital Creativity. She is also on the Board of UK Screen Agency Screen East. For NM2 (New Media, New Millennium), Maureen has developed an original interactive production, RuneCast, incorporating chance operations and oral composition techniques as personalised music and video narrative, and led two productions which repurpose miniseries for interactive broadband: Gods in the Sky Choice (documentary+drama originally produced by WagTV/C4), and Gormenghast Explore (from BBC TV Drama, Gormenghast). Maureen’s other work includes: International UNESCO/NCF New Media Expo, Reykjavik 2003; Cambridge International Film Festival, 2001 (shortlisted for BAFTA interactive award nomination): full-length interactive movie, Vala; Anglia TV/UK Film Council, 2004: Unreal City (animation, d. Peter Addington); Wall to Wall TV/ Channel 4 TV/Discovery Channel, 2002 & 2004: Iceworld (drama-doc d.Tim Lambert); Covent Garden Opera House Linbury Studio, 2001: Lombroso in About Face (music Rachel Leach); New End Theatre, London, 2001: Alice (from Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking Glass) (m.d. Stephen Daltry); Moviemakers 1996: Goodbye Thirteen (d. Sirin Eide) [Jury and Audience awards for Best Film International Festivals Frankfurt 1996 and Antwerp 1997]. In 2004-2006, for LUME Crucible Finland, Maureen developed RunoTanssi, a reconfigurable multimedia dance/music performance (Gloria Theatre, Helsinki; Kuopio International Festival). contact information
Dr. Marian Ursu is a Lecturer in the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London. He holds a PhD in AI (Symbolic Knowledge Representations for Intelligent Design) from Brunel University, UK, and an “Inginer” degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He worked as a Visiting Researcher at a number of institutions including BT AI Lab, MIT Media Lab, and Southampton University. His current research is focused on applications of artificial intelligence techniques, in particular symbolic knowledge representations and reasoning, to new media. At this end, he leads the Goldsmiths Research Team of the NM2 (New Media, New Millennium) project, which is partly funded by the EU, and manages the collaborative project with the Tate, UK, Culture Mining: Creation of a Flexibly Searchable Streaming Media Archive of Contemporary and Modern Art Theory and Practice, funded by the AHRC, UK. In NM2, Marian’s team has created a language for the representation of interactive narrative structures (and, therefore, for ShapeShifted TV programmes), called NSL, an authoring tool that wraps NSL up in a GUI, and an associated reasoning/inference engine. contact information
Dr. Jon Cook Dr. Jon Cook is a Research Fellow in the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, working on the NM2 project. He holds a degree in Mathematics and Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh. During his PhD he investigated, through the implementation of a tool named P#, the feasibility of automatic source to source programming language translation from Prolog to C#. Within the NM2 project he works on the development of the NM2 narrative structure language (NSL), and has designed and implemented the NM2 Inference Engine, which produces playlists based on authored narratives expressed in NSL. He works closely with NM2 production teams advising on the use of the authoring tools and this interaction contributes to the development of the NSL. contact information
Vilmos Zsombori is a Research Assistant in the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London. He holds an "Inginer" degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Before his current position, he worked on AI related projects concerned with model-based analysis and systems modelling at DaimlerChrysler AG, Research and Technology in Berlin and in Shanghai. Since 2006 he is also working on his PhD on the topic of authoring, formal representation and inference for reconfigurable visual narratives. In NM2, Vilmos is working on the design and implementation of a versatile and easy-to-use authoring tool for ShapeShiftedTV productions. This is a GUI for the narrative structure language (NSL). contact information
Michael Hausenblas is a Senior Research Fellow at Joanneum Research, Austria. His main research expertise is in Web applications development, an area in which he was active for the past five years. Michael is involved in W3C, being a member of the Multimedia Semantics Incubator Group and the RDF-in-HTML Task Force of the Semantic Web Deployment Working group. Since 2004 he is working on his PhD on the topic of scalability and expressivity of media semantics. Currently, he is involved in two Research Projects, partly funded by the EU. On the NM2 (New Media, New Millennium) project, he is the scientific lead of Joanneum Research’s team, which looks at tools for semi-automatic semantic annotations of moving image content and reasoning algorithms associated with these in the context of ShapeShifted TV. In the K-Space project, he focuses on "bridging the semantic gap" in multimedia on the Semantic Web. contact information
Ian
Kegel holds an MEng in Electrical and Information Sciences
from the University of Cambridge. He has worked in both the defence and
telecommunications industries on projects ranging from radar signal processing
to multimedia delivery, and has spent the last 8 years undertaking content-related
research within BT. He currently heads the Future Content Group, a team
of 10 researchers whose role it is to supply BT with the product ideas,
technology and foresight which it needs to help its customers take full
advantage of the world of digital content. Ian also co-ordinates a programme
of work to develop compelling new applications and services for the broadband-connected
TV. He collaborates with partners from industry and academia from across
Europe in a variety of projects and initiatives, and is actively involved
in the current EU Framework 6 programme. Ian has presented to many external
audiences including the IEPRC, IBC and broadcasters and media producers
in the UK, and holds several patents in the multimedia content field.
Within NM2, Ian leads the design and development of the NM2 Production
Tools and Middleware, as well as being responsible for the just-in-time
composition technology required to deliver ShapeShiftedTV productions.
contact information