Special Interest Group on CRAP

If you’re a researcher in computer science, then how would you like to be able to watch a video of Turing or von Neumann or - for that matter - how about that lecture you really wanted to hear last week on graph algorithms at Stanford?

Scientists have long been trained to record their formal thoughts for posterity in the form of scientific literature. At the same time, when we produce a new piece of research, we typically give lectures on the subject that contain many examples and visual explanations that don’t fit well into a formal paper. We also typically use an informal style in which we include speculations and insights that we’re not quite sure of. As such, attending a lecture about a new topic is often more interesting than reading the paper itself. It’s not a replacement for the paper of course, since scientific publications are well crafted to present an organized and accurate presentation of ideas.

There are several organizations that make a concerted effort to record video of technical presentations and put them on the web. Some years ago I gave an introductory lecture about cryptography at MSRI in Berkeley, and they recorded the video for posterity. It’s far from my best talk, but it’s nice that it captured my thoughts at the time. My employer (Google) also records and publishes many of the talks that are presented at Google. One of the problems is that good video production still requires a camera operator who constantly adjusts the camera angles and sound levels.

Starting this year I’m going to try an experiment. Since we all give lectures using a laptop these days, I’m going to rig something up on my laptop that will capture the screen as a video, along with the audio of my presentation. Such videos would be very compact, but extremely useful for recording thoughts in scientific publications.

Anybody have recommendations on the best way to do this?