The e-seminar lecture recording and distribution system

Abstract

e-Seminar is an IBM-Research internal prototype platform to allow all IBM-Research employees access to videos and slides of talks, seminars, presentations and other events at any IBM-Research campus worldwide. The platform facilitates an increased use of digital video by lowering the cost and complexity thresholds for the use of video in live and in on demand applications. The e-Seminar system therefore increases the leverage of intellectual property, and helps to improve the communication between the laboratories of the IBM-Research Division All of the above is reached through use of a distributed Video-on-Demand system on all sites of the IBM-Research Division. It is a highly integrative project, assembling tools, techniques and insights from a broad variety of knowledge fields including but not limited to networking, video recording/encoding, data streaming, video analysis, HCI, MM authoring, data visualizing and distributed systems management. The e-Seminar system is designed to serve as a base platform to perform research on the broad range of all these areas. Currently ongoing research in the project explores how such a system can be built and operated with the least amount of people involved while at the same time reducing the breadth and depth of skills necessary. Additional research is done in the area of real time analysis and indexing of the given material in ways that are relevant to the teaching purpose of the system. Also new ways of video network caching are explored.