The University of Bristol is an internationally renowned centre of teaching and research excellence. The collaborative research that the University undertakes with the regional and international community both informs and stimulates our teaching, as well as contributing to the economy of the South West, the UK and globally.
The Bristol region has one of Europe's largest concentrations of high technology in communications, digital media, computer games and related industries. Researchers at the University of Bristol have close relationships with many of these organisations via collaborative projects, staff secondments and visiting industrial staff.
In order to effortlessly achieve a highly dynamic exchange of information, ideas and data, research teams at the University need a high-profile reliable internet connection with our partners. BMEX has been providing exactly that: a transparent and robust high-bandwidth internet connection with the local IT industries, media centres, SMEs and media production businesses.
Direct access to digital content, fast delivery of gigabytes of data, or swift retrieval of information from large distributed databases, are an essential requirement for conducting our experiments. Our research groups that deal with such an enormous amount of data - Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Machine Learning and Wearable Computing – find this resource irreplaceable.
The ICBR project focuses on the management and intelligent content-based retrieval of multimedia, and handles 12000 hours of digitised broadcast-quality video and audio. One of the project’s industrial partners is Granada Media, who are based on Whiteladies Road in Bristol. They host a number of media storage clusters, streaming servers, and metadata databases. These resources are connected to the University Computer Science Department’s cluster of processing servers and workstations via a 100Mbit connection.
In order to access this repository, researchers at University of Bristol preview the content by streaming multiple 1Mbit QuickTime streams. They are able to download content in DV format, as well as to access this enormous video data repository directly from their workstations as mapped network drives. One DV video is approximately 20 gigabytes, which if streamed requires 30Mbps of bandwidth. In addition, the database stores both technical and semantic descriptions of the available content, and researchers are able to query and populate the database from the University through the BMEX connection.
Our vision of the future in multi-media is in distributed processing and storage of terabytes of networked data. BMEX has already proved to be a vital service for research in this area, and we anticipate that networks of this kind will become part of standard infrastructure in the media and research worlds for some time to come.