Project Notes >

Status Report (3/1/08)

AAAI VIDEO ARCHIVE PROJECT
B.G. Buchanan

1. Since our meeting in December, Reid Smith and Jon Glick have been reformatting pages in AITopics and the Video Archive to merge the two sites.. AITopics has been reformatted as a wiki, and both text and video items are now available from the single site AITopics, with much the same look and feel. The navigation bar down the left, for example, is identical on every page and allows users to see both text and video items.

2. Mike Hamilton and Rick Skalsky have changed page names and created redirects. Someone coming into the AAAI home page (www.aaai.org) sees AITopics as one of the top-line choices, and is taken to the new merged site. Links among pages are, we believe, all correct.

3. We have been adding links to AI-related videos and have created pages, with brief descriptions and tags, for over a hundred. Most are robotics videos, not surprisingly. Many of these pages are lists of dozens of videos collected by someone else. One of the tasks we hope volunteers will do is to create our own pages for each of the best videos in these collections.

4. The AI Magazine is publishing a description of the project in the next issue. The URLs mentioned in the article will point to the correct pages. We want the article to help us in the following respects: a) Bring in submissions for additional videos to include b) Identify people who would like to volunteer time c) Inform the AI community that the resource is available and can be useful for instruction

5. We are coordinating with David Aha and Sebastian Thrun, who run the video competition at the national conference. We will provide tangible prizes (iPods) for best video in several categories, as an additional way of publicizing the site.

6. We are looking for a student to assist Jon Glick in Pittsburgh with many tasks associated with further integration of the text and video sites.

Status Report (12/31/07)

AAAI VIDEO ARCHIVE PROJECT
B.G. Buchanan

Reid Smith, Jon Glick & I met for a day and a half December 19-20 to discuss open projects.

1. As a first step in integrating AITopics and the Video Archive, Reid had mapped several of the top-level AITopics pages into wiki format. Every page in the Video Archive links to AITopics and these top-level pages all link to the archive. Reid has also devised an efficient "Wiki-izing" recipe and spent a day walking Jon through the process. They also addressed and resolved many of the design/formatting issues occasioned by combining the Archive with AI Topics. We now have a more or less completely translated AI Topics Wiki, with essentially all pages except for the lower level news archives, site statistics, and the toons pages.

2. We discussed many ideas for further integration, including the projects listed on the Wiki Development? page.

3. We explored ideas for promoting the Archive. These include:

• sponsoring a modest prize in the video competition that David Aha & Sebastian Thrun run at the national conference
• asking AAAI members to inform their students and colleagues about the resource;
• funding a competition for teaching modules that utilize videos;
• sending a speaker on a road show to universities, labs, etc.;
• having a lobby table at AAAI-08 to recruit page editors

4. We will start digitizing tapes on our own that we can put up on the web site. Jon will review the list of CMU videos that Gabrielle Michalek is holding and start prioritizing them.

5. We are ready to start working with archivists to send out some VHS tapes or films for archival-quality processing, in order to develop a procedure that is easy for us as well as for archivists.

6. We are investigating finding additional server space to store more videos. We will coordinate with Rick Skalsky to avoid any possible conflicts.

7. Reid is continuing to improve security on the site and reduce our exposure to spammers. We are implementing levels of permission on individual pages so that only authorized editors for a section will be able to change pages within the section.

8. We are working on an expanded set of policies. Wikipedia’s policies cover most contingencies and provide reminders of what we might encounter.

9. We are experimenting with a new look for pages on the site.

Status Report (7/29/07)

AAAI VIDEO ARCHIVE PROJECT
B.G. Buchanan

We continue to make progress on the video archive. In particular:

1. The NSF grant has been approved and is winding through the signature process. It's $110K for one year, with a good chance for renewal.

2. Jon, Reid and I have met with archivists at both CMU and Stanford, who are very willing to collaborate on a follow-on proposal (probably to NSF) that will include money for digitizing new materials and archiving the originals (which the new grant does not cover).

3. We have been tuning the wiki and adding pages that identify URLs of videos already digitized. If you haven't browsed the wiki recently, take a look at www.aaai.org/videos

4. Jon, Reid & I have had several good discussions about integrating the video collection into AITopics. We are currently exploring a revision of AITopics as a wiki.

5. We gave the AAAI Council an update on our activities last week, with only positive feedback.

6. At the conference we solicited volunteers to help us collect and edit videos and have eight signed up. Their names appear on the Project People page of the wiki under "Editorial Board". All members of the Advisory Board are invited to become members of the Editorial Board.

7. One issue we are exploring is the extent to which we can easily involve other national AI societies in putting up and vetting foreign-language materials on AITopics, including videos. I am a little nervous putting things on our site that I can't understand, so having an official organization vouching for each item is important.

Questions and suggestions are welcome.

Status Report (4/24/07)

AAAI VIDEO ARCHIVE PROJECT
B.G. Buchanan

[The pilot project was funded by the NSF (#0609678) and the AAAI, with considerable amounts of donated time by individuals.]

1. Create a master catalog (virtual archive) of videos already digitized and on the web plus those in library archives.

The wiki is a major step forward, thanks to Reid Smith’s work. It is still sparsely populated, but it has the capacity to grow.

Anyone can submit URL's for new additions and add information about existing videos to the wiki. We intend to limit editing privileges to AAAI members in order to reduce the amount of false or misleading information added.

We are in the process of defining form & content for the master catalog plus a procedure for adding new videos to it automatically. For now, the wiki itself is the catalog.

We are linking videos to relevant pages in AITopics.

We are balancing some manual effort to create a new entry against the effort required to write code that automates everything. As you can see from the wiki, we collect information from an individual who then submits it in an email message to Reid. Reid then creates a new wiki page for the video and either edits or creates new pages for additional linking.

A good student project is writing code to automate some or all of the steps (e.g., automatically creating pages and linking them to data pages, alphabet pages, master catalog, etc.). Please volunteer a student if you can.

We will need funding to pay a consultant to maintain the wiki and to cover some staff time for clerical work.

2. Preserve videotapes & films of historic interest by sending them to institutional archives. Make high-quality DVDs available to individuals & other institutions.

We have been working with Stanford librarians on a model that is feasible for us and for archivists.

We are working with people at Stanford and the British Library to define guidelines on meta-data. There are no accepted standards for video, but we are trying to stay consistent with what archivists telll us they need.

We intend to form a consortium of institutions that will agree to take on the responsibility of permanent, archival storage for videos we send to them.

We still need to create an editorial board that will assign priorities to the tapes and movies not already archived. Priority will be based on uniqueness, historical interest (including date and pedagogical value), and condition.

The actual copying onto an archival medium will be done by a video service or university library. The cost is estimated at about $200 per hour of video.

Jon Glick and Mike Hamilton are exploring legal issues including copyright, fair use, permissions, and challenges. We currently believe that pedagogical use by a non-profit organization is “fair use” and keeps us pretty clear. We are also on safer ground when we link to videos stored elsewhere.

We intend to provide DVDs on demand to libraries, archives, and individuals. We may charge a nominal fee for copying & mailing to discourage collectors of everything free and to help cover actual costs.

We need funding to pay for acquiring rights, digitizing, archiving, and creating high-quality DVDs so the consortium archives are not penalized for participating.

3. Identify short clips from videos for pedagogical purposes.

We are devising a short procedure that members can follow to identify clips for us. ** First cut: Watch video, note interesting segments, note start/end times for each, make notes about what the clip shows and why it is interesting, and suggest tags. This information is requested on the submission page.

For now we will identify start times and durations of selected clips; later we may want to move clips to the AAAI server and add pointers into them from AITopics

We want to find subject-level editors for all major subject-areas to take responsibility for monitoring wiki changes. Suggestions & volunteers welcome.