Certain VREs from Manchester were discussed and presented at the Knowledge Exchange workshop on Virtual Research Environments: Catalysts of Change in Birmingham 17 – 18 November 2011 This included the “5 minutes of madness” presentations ; the ViCo-X project preliminaries were outlined with comments from across the user base.

The event’s 32 tweets were captured on CritterVRE

The goal of this Knoledgwe Exchange is to promote Virtual Research Environments as “important instruments for international cooperation in research and as an advanced means of information exchange in an emerging European research area.”

The activity data synthesis site is now live at: http://www.activitydata.org

Cross-referenced links across all the Activity Data projects with general lessons and guides  given. A direct link to the Access Grid  data is at http://www.activitydata.org/AGtivity.html

New equipment and new machines for a new kind of linked service has started in the last few weeks.

The ideas will be presented at the Knowled Exchange Workshop in Birmingham 17-18 November 2011: “Virtual Research Environment: Catalysts of Change”.

There is a five-minutes “madness” session on Thu 17/11/11 a bit after 4pm; where all (or some) items will be revieled.

Planned is a video conference of a show-and-tell of visualisations and results from the JISC Activity Data analysis for the Access Grid Video Conference usage. This clarifies video confereneing room utlisation, comparisons with booking system and ability to measure CO2 savings.

If you wish a Past Diary of your Access Grid physical space or virtual node to be created please email: martin.turner@manchester.ac.uk

• Physical Location, Date and Time: Wednesday 21st December 2011; 2-3pm: Kilburn Building room1:10, The University of Manchester.
• Virtual Venue is Lass O Gowrie lass-o-gowrie(sam.ag.manchester.ac.uk)@conference.mcs.anl.gov

A question came out as to what a year of AG events in the UK looks like.

The following two graphs show those meetings run through the ‘AG Collaboration’ services managed by JANET(UK): mainly for IOCOM events. The graphs show meetings involving multiple sites, that lasted more than a couple of minutes but less than three hours.

Now looking forward to a busy and ‘AG collaboration’ 2011/12.

Demonstration (SustainedMAGIC) and paper presentation (OneVRE) occured at the e-Science All Hands Meeting.

We were indirectly associated with the NGS (National Grid Service) stand, and some pics of the locations at the University of York, as well as the unusual demonstration space – my photos so the demonstration is of the kinect device being shown by Microsoft – Kenji Takeda.

New AG Specialist Projects leaflet launched at the e-Science All Hands Meeting in York.

MAGICal Moments: snippet editing of multiple video data streams

Software demonstration at the e-Science All Hands Meeting – 2011. Wednesday 16:30-16:45 This will be held in York University: 26-29 September 2011.

Abstract: One of, if not the largest users of the Advanced Video Conferencing System, the Access Grid (http://www.accessgrid.org/), is the 19 university strong postgraduate Mathematics Training Service MAGIC (http://maths.dept.shef.ac.uk/magic/). This service, which has been going for the last five years, transmits and records video and audio streams between these UK universities, enabling multiple departments to share scarce and costly lecturing resources. There are thousands of individual video and audio time-stamped RTP packets that have been created.

The ViCo (Video Conversion, http://code.google.com/p/vicovre/) service, funded by JISC under the VRE (Virtual Research Environment) programme, allows the selection and then conversion of specific sub-parts parts of these lectures. This enables the material to be re-purposed for other uses. We will demonstrate the simple editing process that is built upon a GWT interface; and allows a single editor to easily take the multiple video and audio streams and blend them, either rebuilding a layout on the fly using the flv flash format as an online webservice, or convert the screen layout to mp4 or wmv file format for offline use.

Attended a workshop considering the issues around creating ‘magic’al books – those based upon the Access Grid broadcasting technology of the 19 university strong MAGIC consortium.

This was a list of questions asked:

• Definition and use of Creative Commons licenses for documents. This was highly recommended but not always possible.
• What is the Access Grid, advanced Video Conferencing system and a level of its scale and size was given.
• What platform should a magical book be on – possibly laptop disconnected from the internet and/or an iphone or ipad.
• What are the advantages of magical books;- ability to links to snippets of video examples, case studies and q-and-a sessions.
• Quality issues were raised in that capture must be done as ‘high’ as quality as possible and transmitted according to the viewing device.
• Question regarding if there should be a style file – controlling micro-details for example layout of pdf text or very general in description.
• Recommended to have practice sessions and look at previous examples of CPD outcomes including those from MACE. See previous post on guidelines.
• When to include specific publishers on-board the project and a large ‘marketing’ process to be undertaken.
• Should we have short or long snippets of nearly an hour – or just always both.

Recording have legal issues – and JANET have produced guidelines for recording videoconferencing services. General guide specifically for the JVCRS is on a website.

Four possible examples were given:

1. Risk – key novelty may be in the number of ‘case studies’ that can be extracted out individually
2. CFD – key novelty may be in videos or user-interaction of machine/hand simulation examples (STREAM, Code_Saturn, StarCCMs)
3. Continuum Modelling – topics described as ‘mystery book’ ideology in presentation
4. Advanced Maths Modelling – MAGIC code #22, and act as a vanilla magical book

Choice of modules for Phase 1 – Oct-Dec 2011 need to be made. Three other topics were included in the discussion; X-Ray Tomography, Inverse Problems of EM and Acoustics (GeoPhysics) and Signal and Image Processing.

Some little tid bits of useful information that we came across worked out during the development of this project. Most of them about handling timestamps between UNIX, GNUplot and Excel.

UNIX Time

Converting between UNIX time and something readable using the UNIX date command:

date --date=@123456789
date --date="4 Jan 1982" +"%s"

Excel Time

This is a floating point number were the integer part gives the date and the decimal part the time. It uses a different epoch than UNIX time. To convert from UNIX time to Excel time:

Te = Tu/86400.0 + 25569

GNUplot Time

GNUplot has a different epoch from UNIX also. Though it will read UNIX timestamps if the time format is specified as:

set xdata time
set timefmt x "%s"

However if you want to specify specific points on a graph with time axes to position annotation say you will need to use GNUplot time:

Tg = Tu -946684800

String Hashing

When comparing a set of strings it is far more efficient to convert the strings to an integer and then just compare these. We using the following hashing function found on Stackoverflow.com (C):

unsigned int hash_string(char *str) {
    unsigned int hash = 0;
    int c;

    while (str && (c = *str++)) {
        /* hash = hash * 33 ^ c */
        hash = ((hash << 5) + hash) ^ c;
    }

    return hash;
}