Ref: EP/F002327/1 and Ref: EP/F004842/1

Visiting Fellowship 2007 - David Bainbridge

As part of a sabbatical from his Senior Lecturer post at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, Dr Bainbridge visited the UK supported by an EPSRC fellowship. Hosted by Dr. Matt Jones and Prof. Harold Thimbleby from the the Future Interaction Technology (FIT) lab at the University of Swansea, he worked on novel approaches for combining mobile devices and digital libraries. This project work complemented on-going FIT Lab projects on mobile digital libraries and the digital divide and more generally, mobile information access.

Bainbridge also visited Prof. Rüger based at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), Open University to collaborate on multimedia digital libraries. Short visits where also taken to other collaborators: UCL (Prof. Ann Blanford), Queen Mary's (Prof. Mark Sandler) and Leeds (Dr. Kia Ng) who work with Bainbridge in the areas of HCI, music digital libraries, document content analysis, respectively.

Work Package 1: Identification of role Greenstone can play to ongoing FIT projects.

In the initial phase of Bainbridge's visit to Swansea he spent time meeting staff and discussing research projects. In particular, FIT researchers presented their work, and brain-storming sessions were held from which a candidate, prioritised list of applications of Greenstone was drawn up.

Work Package 2: Case-study prototyping Greenstone for a mobile, handheld environment.

A range of digital library capabilities running on an iPod, utilising the Greenstone code-base, were explored. Full details are provided in Digital Libraries on an iPod: beyond the client-server model.

A video showing one of the capabilities, digital stories, is available here

A video showing one of the capabilities, collaging, is available here

Work Package 3: Application of DL research to a FIT ongoing project

For this work package, we used the spatial search capability devised for Greenstone (Barr) and repurposed it for Questions not Answers project. More details can be found in the report A map-based Place-browser for a PDA.

A video showing the prototype in use is available here

Work Package 4: Cross-fertilisation of video based DL techniques from FIT with KMi

The cross-fertilisation work conducted as this part of the visit ultimately culminated in a workshop attended by KMi and FIT Lab members. Details, and video-casts of some of the presentations can be accessed through KMi Podium.

As result of this particular workpackage a video plugin as been developed for Greenstone that supports video streaming and utilises keyframe analysis developed by Rüger and his team. An example of its use, based on content from YouTube, can been see here. The work also feeds back into the FIT Lab's StoryBank project, where video content is now uploaded from mobile-phone over BlueTooth into a Greenstone digital library server which forms the the story-bank repository.

Work Package 5: Encouragement, mentoring, development of new researchers and training for practitioners.

During the course of his visit, Bainbridge met with numerous PhD/Masters students and new researchers, discussing their work and sharing experiences. Centres where this was done was as follows:

• The Department of Computer Science, University of Swansea -- additionally gave guest lecture to an Honours year class; participated in an in-house computer graphics workshop
• the Knowledge Media Institute , Open University -- additionally gave seminar to wider research community; result of this led to follow up meetings with the Open University Library.
• Centre for Digital Music, Department of Electronic Engineering, Queen Marys Collage, London -- additionally gave a talk as part of their seminar programme.
• University College London Interaction Centre (UCLIC)
• Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music, University of Leeds.

Work Package 6: Review of state-of-play of UK Digital Libraries in relation to multimedia content analysis and digital libraries with particular focus mobile environments.

A report is being written and will be circulated in due course.