HomePortfolioMicrosoft Research Annotation System

a website by Francis Li

MRAS is a platform for developing applications that anchor annotations on multimedia content. I helped to develop the MRAS system and build applications for online training and usability video evaluation.

The MRAS online training application was used by an internal Microsoft training course for employees. Students worked remotely and asynchronously, communicating with the instructor using the application and email. The application combined a pre-recorded streaming video of the instructor synchronized with presentation slides and student notes (Figure 1). At any time during video playback, students could type in questions and/or comments which would be anchored to the current position in the video. The MRAS platform automatically emailed questions to the instructor, whose answers would be added to the annotations on the video.

Publications:

• Asynchronous Collaboration Around Multimedia and its Application to On-Demand Training
  Bargeron, D., Gupta, A., Grudin, J., Sanocki, E., Li, F. In Proceedings of the 34th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-34), January 3-6, 2001, Maui, Hawaii (CD-ROM), Copyright 2001 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE), 10 pages.

External sites:

• Collaborative & Multimedia Systems Group

• Microsoft Research

Figure 1. The online training application built using the MRAS platform.