British Telecommunications Public Limited Company

Ian Christopher Kegel

Timothy Sean Stevens

Jason Morphett

Jeremy M Thorne

Martin Russ

Tamas Jambor

Jun Wang

Andrew Wills

Peter James Hughes

Yousif Humeida

Timothy Stevens

Ivan Roper

Joshan Meenowa

Adam Hay

Dale Robertson

Martin Reed

Alex Sj Palmer

Karis Bailey

Louie Ks Lim

Ludvig Lohse

Methods and apparatus are disclosed for managing streamed audio communication sessions between user devices () configured to send streamed data indicative of received audio contributions from respective participants in a multiple-participant audio communication session via a communications network to one or more other user devices () for conversion to audio representations of said received audio contributions for other participants. The method comprises monitoring audio contributions from respective participants, and in response to detection therefrom that a first participant is beginning to make an audio contribution at a first one of said user devices () after a period of silence, providing a signal for at least one of said other user devices () indicating that the first participant is beginning to make an audio contribution; and in response to receipt at said at least one other user device () of such a signal, triggering a predetermined audible indication for a participant at said at least one other user device () that said first participant is beginning to make an audio contribution.

Managing streamed audio communication sessions

Methods and apparatus are disclosed for selecting encoding specifications for encoding audio and/or video data to be streamed from a sender to a receiver via a network. Methods and apparatus for encoding data using a selected encoding specification, and for streaming data which has been encoded using a selected encoding specification from a sender to a receiver via a network are also disclosed. The selecting method comprises selecting an encoding specification (s) in dependence on performance measures () previously obtained using a plurality of different encoding specifications in respect of a monitored network when in each of a plurality of different network conditions (), respective network conditions being characterised by different combinations of data-transmission characteristics.

Methods and apparatus for the encoding of audio and/or video data

User interaction data is heuristically processed to determine its usefulness to a remote recommender system. The data is ranked according it its likely ability to indicate a user preference towards a particular content item. The amount of data sent to the recommender system can then be limited to data records falling in a predetermined range of usefulness. A controller may be provided to determine what range is necessary so that the minimum amount of training data is provided to the recommender system to drive the recommender system's performance towards a set level.

Recommender control system, apparatus, method and related aspects

Methods, apparatus and systems are disclosed for managing streamed communication (such as video, audio, or audio-visual communication) between client devices and remote devices via a digital data communication network in situations where the data communication network comprises one or more routers operable to receive streamed data from one or more client devices and/or from one or more other routers, and to forward such streamed data to one or more remote devices and/or to one or more other routers such as to enable the client device and potentially-varying subsets of the one or more remote devices to participate in a communication session.

Managing streamed communication

A recommender system () is described which is capable of being controlled using training data provided by an external controller (). The controller () is arranged to control the input of training data from client devices () to a recommender system () to drive the recommender system's performance towards a set level.

A method and apparatus for encoding media content. In the field of video compression, temporal compression generates I-frames and dependent P-frames and B-frames. The placement of I-frames is determined by the presence of scene switches in the video. In order to improve the ability of a user to seek to interesting parts of the video, a video encoder considers semantic data identifying narrative points of interest within the video. The encoding process generates encoded video data having I-frames present at scene transitions and also at narratively interesting parts of the video.

Media data encoding apparatus and method

Metadata is associated with media elements in a content store during automatic composition of media articles. The metadata includes relationship data indicating how what is portrayed by that media element relates to what is portrayed by one or more other media elements. Because relationship metadata is included media articles can be generated automatically with the need for the production of a detailed framework describing that media article.

Automatic media article composition using previously written and recorded media object relationship data

A computer apparatus which uses a database () to offer persistent storage of metadata () describing the content of media files (). Metadata is used to create a personalized media article () from those media files. That metadata also indicates relationships between those media files. In order to accelerate the creation of the personalized media article (), media element metadata items are stored in a cache. The usefulness of this cache is improved further by reading related media elements data from retrieved metadata items (), and then pre-fetching those items and placing them in the cache. Because the relatedness of the data items means that the related data item is more likely to be required in the near future, the caching method is more useful than known caching methods. Furthermore, the improved usefulness of the cache is achieved without placing constraints on where the data items are placed in the persistent storage.

Growing community of inventors

Woodbridge, United Kingdom

Ian Christopher Kegel