We are hosting our first Build the BBC event in Edinburgh, featuring a series of lightning talks from our Design + Engineering department. BBC Design + Engineering is driving the reinvention of public service digital media, we deliver television, radio and online services to millions of people every day.
Our aim is to deliver a BBC that's vital and engaging – that reflects and responds to the needs of the country. It's lively, participatory and personalised.
From Panorama to Poldark, Killing Eve to Still Game come along and find out what we are doing for iplayer, Sounds and BBC News, our work on personalisation, recommendations engines and Voice skills, and how our teams in Scotland are growing in numbers to support this expansion across our digital products
As well as talks from our team, there will be refreshments, the chance to network, and to meet members of our team.
Lightning Talks:
Welcome
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Are there funny murderers? When is a comedy not a comedy? What is Fleabag anyway? And why would the BBC’s publishing systems have to care? Colin Robertson, Software Engineering Team Lead explains.
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"Alexa, play Radio nan Gàidheal" - have you ever wondered how voice assistants understand the variety of content the BBC publishes? Gemma Hanley, Test Team Lead and David Low, Executive Product Manager from Voice+AI will take you through the pitfalls of training computers to listen and understand, some of the unexpected lessons along the way, and how we can test and learn to do it better.”
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Ewan Nicolson, Lead Data Scientist and Christina Boididou, Data Scientist, will share how we do data science in the BBC, and some examples of the value that we deliver to the audience using data.
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"Do you have any recordings from the 1947 Edinburgh International Festival?" The BBC has one of the largest broadcast archives in the world and as we head towards the BBC's centenary we are striving to unlock more of this content. Lynne Dent, Senior Product manager and Paul Burt, Software Engineering Manager, explain how we are doing this using modern search and and discovery tools, helping our programme makers to tell the story of the UK's past and present.
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This month sees Bitesize launch a brand-new destination for Primary School students, along with a practice experience aimed at helping them read and write through Phonics. But how do you go about making products for these tiny people? Stuart Brown, Senior Product Manager for Bitesize explains all.
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Matt Taylor, Software Engineering Manager, BBC Sounds + iPlayer will share some insights into how the teams building iPlayer for mobile devices use some lesser-known techniques from lean manufacturing to ensure technical debt and engineering concerns are planned and tackled at the same level of priority as product features, change and BAU ultimately allowing greater control of product development.
Doors open at 17:30 with talks starting promptly at 18.30.
The Place is situated at 34-38 York Place at the East end of Queen Street, a minute’s walk from the St James’ Bus Station, five minutes’ walk from Waverley Railway Station and has a the last tram stop situated right in front of their building for those travelling from Edinburgh Airport – (see link for options to get to and from the airport)
