Please note that the present pages on the ICTP workshop were obtained from a mediawiki used during the workshop. There may be a number of links that go to missing pages, and other inconsistencies. Much of it is also very informal, and should be seen as workshop notes!

From: User:Mathe/BlogEntry: 2007 December 10 08:07:26 UTC This morning session is on EyA, the automated recording used to record lectures at ICTP. Carlo Fonda is presenting. We have already seen the system at work and it is pretty impressive. We are now being briefed about the history that led to the birth of Eya. This history includes the analysis statistics of Internet penetration. On average about a million of scientists are estimated to have internet connectivity. Question: will it be possible to reach most of those scientists using just the traditional methods such as conferences? Not likely! Unless we find alternative means of availing such content in different ways and perhaps different times. With this in mind the ICTP came up with the following solution that has three dimensions to it:

• Live contact through video conferencing or webcasting
• Archive content by storing the text content(pdf, ppt)
• Archive video recording and slides

Concentrating on the latter, the problem was how to do the recording without increasing the staff. This plus other reasons led to the need to provide a system that doesn't require human intervention, that is non invasive, that is of high quality but uses low cost equipment. In addition to ensure that the content would be effectively disseminated there were additional requests such as ensure that if the video were to be streamed those with low bandwidth can get access, ... All of the above plus those that I didn't write about resulted in the birth of the mighty EyA (enhance your audience). Some of the features of Eya include:

• audio/video recording
• automatic file transfer to server for processing
• synchronization of photos, slides, ...

Some of the things to consider if one wanted to employ the system at their respective institutions:

• Costs - installation, servers, other obvious equipment like digital cameras
• Need of redundancy? (this is highly recommended but is not a must)
• codecs in use (flash version not yet out but will soon be available)
• file size - at the moment effort has been done to reduce file sizes