Many years ago (well, about 5) I came across MURL. Back then I was finishing my M.Eng and I was contemplating whether I should start a Ph.D or join the industry, the usual questions any 21 year-old in my position would have.
I had moved to a university owned hall of residence a year earlier, so I had a relatively fast connection for the time (The link to the university data network was provided by fibre at 2Mbits before being converted back to coaxial and fed into a router for distribution to the hall) and it was relatively easy to make sure that your packets had ‘preferential’ treatment over those of your ‘fellow students’.
My M.Eng year was quite uneventful and not very challenging academically, so I had a lot of free time, during which I hacked FreeBSD and KDE, fooled around with all sorts of *nices, read lots of books, watched lots of movies, saw lots of friends etc.
One of the things that had a part in my unsocial days at Imperial back then and that I had completely forgotten about, until today, is MURL or the Multi University Research Laboratory. This was a series of seminars and lectures by distinguished academics in the broader field of Computer Science, that had taken place in some of the top universities in the world and which were recorded and made available by Microsoft Research to the world via the internet. Sure, you had to use a player that supported ASF/WMV, but that was ok. The contribution by Microsoft was immeasurable and very much appreciated.
I spent countless hours in 2001 and early 2002 watching seminars from Stanford, MIT, PARC, Microsoft Research and Carnegie-Mellon among others. Sometimes academics I personally knew that had worked with colleagues at Imperial or other British universities, such as UCL, Cambridge or Oxford would lecture on topics related to their work. For some reason unbeknown to me, I was thrilled to listen about stuff that I would normally not even bother to study for my exams.
After starting my Ph.D in late 2002, I mentally placed MURL in the history chest along with most things that had to do with my undergraduate years. Until today that is. A friend reminded me of an old web-page I had at the time, and through searching in the Wayback Machine, I found a cached copy of (part of) it that included a quote from a Bruce Schneier lecture at Microsoft Research (I still remember it! Well, both the quote and the lecture.)
MURL seems to have ‘moved’ to ResearchChannel, a much broader and larger effort. ResearchChannel is huge, by comparison, and covers more or less most topics taught at research universities today, including arts, social sciences and of course physical sciences, computing and maths.
The original MURL effort seems to have more or less dissolved and by visiting the ‘MURL’ page on ResearchChannel one finds only the University of Washington on the list.
ResearchChannel seems too large and faceless compared to MURL. It is also harder to search and navigate, at least that’s how it seemed to me in the little time I spent there earlier today. In addition, a lot of the original MURL content I watched while an undergrad seems to have been removed altogether. Microsoft Research content is now hosted by the University of Washington (see note on MURL today above) and viewing anything off their site (practically all of the Computer Science lectures) requires Windows and IE6 (yikes!). Also lower-quality content from second or third tier universities is now quite common; whereas in MURL most lectures were delivered by the leading researchers in their field and were high-quality academic lectures by academics for academics, ResearchChannel is largely about low quality lectures and seminars as well as boring content-free ‘interview’-type, ‘topic documentaries’ by pseudo-academics for laymen.
Even though I now have a much slower connection than what I had back then (Hellas is effectively more than 5 years behind Europe in this respect) I would be keen to ‘waste’ some more time watching online lectures. While ResearchChannel seems worse than MURL at first sight and lacks the ‘community’ feeling that MURL had, I hope I’ll be able to find at least some interesting lectures to watch in the near future.
Perhaps, some of the more scholarly among you might be interested in it too.
To get you started, for those interested in the Internet culture, here is a Stanford documentary about Yahoo! from 1997 as found in ResearchChannel.
Enjoy.
