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News & Analysis                                                                                                                                  physicsworld.com




The video revolution made simple                                                                                        for an hour-long lecture, making it
                                                                                                                        quick to download. If, however, the
                                                                                                                        speaker starts writing a lot on the
                                                                                                                        blackboard, then this file size will
Video is already established as a powerful medium on the Web, but now                                                   increase to 200 MB.
                                                                                                                          The system currently costs about
physicists in Italy have developed a new system that makes it easier to                                                 $1500 for the camera, webcam and
broadcast scientific talks and lectures online. Michael Banks reports                                                   computer, which has to be bought for
                                                                                                                        every room in which one wants to
When it comes to scientific papers,                                                                                     record in. Although the ICTP does




                                                                                                                 ICTP
physicists have embraced the Web                                                                                        not provide the hardware, it can give
whole-heartedly ­ writing, posting                                                                                      advice about how best to set the sys-
and downloading articles as if it were                                                                                  tem up. Once the automatic process-
second nature. However, physicists                                                                                      ing of the lecture is complete, the file
have been much slower in realizing                                                                                      gets transferred onto a master server
that the Internet is a great way of pub-                                                                                costing about $1000 that stores all the
lishing not just written material but                                                                                   processed files and publishes them on
videos too. That reluctance is surpri-                                                                                  the Web automatically.
sing given the huge popularity of web-
sites such as YouTube, which allows                                                                                     Who's watching
anyone to share videos and "broad-                                                                                      The main reason why the ICTP has
cast yourself" as the site's slogan goes.                                                                               developed this system is that it wants
   Recently, however, there have been       EyA in action            image of the lecturer. Ronchetti and               to disseminate its lectures to research-
some signs that things are starting         Recording lectures at    colleagues tweaked the software so                 ers and students in the developing
to change, For example, a lecture on        the International        that the video screen was larger and               world to fulfil its mission to support
"atoms and heat" that was posted on         Centre for Theoretical   also cut the live broadcasts by only               the best scientists in those nations.
YouTube by Richard Muller, a physi-         Physics in Trieste.      posting lectures via post-production.              "Recordings done with EyA are open
cist at the University of California at                              As Ronchetti points out, there is little           to everyone," says Canessa who works
Berkeley, has so far been viewed more                                point in students watching lectures                in the ICTP's science dissemination
than 90 000 times since it went live in                              live on the Internet from home.                    unit. Whole courses are now being
September. The University of Ber-                                    "They'd be better off coming into                  filmed automatically with EyA at the
keley, meanwhile, has started to post                                class," he says.                                   ICTP, with a lecture series on "Sym-
whole lecture courses on YouTube,                                       Although all one needs to run the               metries, electron bands and phonons"
while the website SciVee lets scientists                             LODE system is a computer, video                   by Sandro Scandolo, a condensed-
upload videos of themselves discus-                                  camera and the appropriate software,               matter physicist at the ICTP, having
sing their papers.                                                   the production costs from editing and              already been downloaded more than
   Conference organizers have also                                   running the equipment manually are                 3000 times since the start of October.
been quick to see the potential of                                   still high. However, a team of physi-                 One physicist who has taken ad-
posting videos of talks on the Internet.                             cists led by Enrique Canessa at the                vantage of EyA is Snezhana Abarzhi,
This involves hiring a camera opera-                                 International Centre for Theoretical               a theorist from the University of Chi-
tor to film the presentation and then                                Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, have             cago, who organized and spoke at a
preparing an edited version to be                                    now built a new system, known as                   recent conference on "Turbulent mix-
downloaded or streamed. But given                                    Enhance Your Audience (EyA), to                    ing and beyond" at the ICTP. Her lec-
the expense and hassle of hiring an                                  address this problem. It consists of a             tures were recorded in full by the new
operator ­ not to mention the cost of                                webcam, digital camera and micro-                  EyA system, and Abarzhi says she is
editing and processing the videos ­                                  phone that are controlled by a pro-                using some of the videos in funding
most conference organizers rarely                                    gram running on an Apple Mac                       proposals. " [The funding committee]
film every lecture. Worse still, the re-                             computer. EyA is fully automated,                  can then directly see me talking about
sulting videos usually only show the                                 which means it can video someone                   my research," she says.
speaker and nothing more, which                                      giving a talk or a series of lectures and             Although only two EyA systems
means that valuable information                                      broadcast it over the Internet without             have been installed outside the ICTP,
contained in the lectures ­ such as                                  any human intervention.                            physicists are already thinking about
detailed views of the speakers trans-                                   The system's webcam records con-                how to develop it further. "The weak
parencies or blackboard ­ is minimal.                                tinuous images of the speaker and                  point of Eya is that it offers little
                                                                     their slides, while the digital camera             support for semantic navigation,"
Lecture window                                                       takes high-resolution still pictures ­             says Ronchetti. This means that
In 2004 an attempt to cut costs was                                  at a rate of up to one every 15 s ­ of             searching for a topic in a database of
provided by a system called Lectures                                 the front wall of the lecture room.                lecture broadcasts is impossible at
on Demand (LODE) developed by                                        Users can therefore zoom in to see                 the moment. Future versions of the
Marco Ronchetti, a physicist at the         Recordings               any specific area (such as a black-                software could even allow links to
Universitá di Trento in Italy. He                                    board or a transparency). The clever               Wikipedia entries, related scientific
adapted an open-source software             done with the            aspect about the system is that the                articles or books to appear when a
package called ePresence, which was         Enhance Your             digital camera can recognize when                  speaker says a particular word, thus
developed by staff at the University        Audience                 something has changed in the pre-                  allowing users to stop if they do not
of Toronto, Canada, to synchronize                                   sentation. If, say, a speaker does not             understand something. In the end,
video, audio and transparencies. It
                                            system are               make many changes on the black-                    however, persuading the more con-
just focuses on the slides and voice of     open to                  board, then fewer pictures are taken               servative physicists to get in front of
the presenter, and only includes a tiny     everyone                 and the file size will be about 120 MB             the camera may well be hard enough.

14                                                                                                                                    Physics World December 2007