IUI is the annual meeting of the intelligent interfaces community and serves as the principal international forum for reporting outstanding research and development on intelligent user interfaces.
“In this paper, we investigate a new style for presenting information. We introduce the notion of presentation teams which -- rather than addressing the user directly -- convey information in the style of performances to be observed by him or her. The paper presents an approach to the automated generation of performances which has been tested in two different application scenarios, car sales dialogues and soccer commentary.”
“Although a user's navigation history contains a lot of hidden information about the relationship between web pages and between users, this information is usually not exploited. The information hidden in the history can be an invaluable source of knowledge in assisting a user to better surf the Web. We presented a system which actively monitors and tracks a user's navigation. Once a user's navigation history is captured, we apply data mining techniques to discover the hidden knowledge contained in the history. The knowledge is then used to suggest potentially interesting web pages to users.”
“Novice users often face many difficulties in mastering current highly interactive systems. In this paper we describe CACTUS, an interactive system used to develop tutorial courses for software applications. CACTUS tutorial courses provide more adequate and more dynamical explanations than currently existing teaching components, since they are task-oriented and provide just-in-time context-dependent explanations. These tutors are also able to follow-up the user activity and act according to what they perform. CACTUS is an environment that uses the model-based design technology. In particular, CACTUS uses declarative hierarchical task-models to derive guidance instructions. Additionally, CACTUS releases tutorial course designers from part of the intensive workload of developing tutor programs as these guidance components are currently developed. This system helps to generate application tutorial courses based on a metaphor that represents the contents of the courses as if they were textbooks, so that learning an application is assimilated to reading a book on certain subject and performing some activities.”
“This article describes Artificial Life, Inc's WebGuide, an intelligent software bot that helps users navigate a Web site using natural language. The article describes the technology behind ALife-WebGuide, discusses some of the issues involved in commercialization of this type of user interface, and summarizes possible enhancements for future versions of this product.”
“The Portable Satellite Assistant (PSA) is a softball-sized flying robot designed to operate autonomously onboard manned and unmanned spacecraft in pressurized micro-gravity environments. In this paper we provide an overview of some of the design challenges we face in making the PSA practical, effective, and usable for future space missions. In particular we highlight the need for an agent architecture supporting adjustable autonomy and a generic model of teamwork.”
“For intelligent interfaces attempting to learn a users' interests, the cost of obtaining labeled training instances is prohibitive because the user must directly label each training instance, and few users are willing to do so. We present an approach that circumvents the need for human-labeled pages. Instead, we learn "surrogate" tasks where the desired output is easily measured, such as the number of hyperlinks clicked on a page or the amount of scrolling performed. Our assumption is that these outputs will highly correlate with the user's interests. In other words, by unobtrusively "observing" the user's behavior we are able to learn functions of value. For example, an intelligent browser could silently observe the user's browsing behavior during the day, then use these training examples to learn such functions and gather, during the middle of the night, pages that are likely to be of interest to the user. Previous work has focused on learning a user profile by passively observing the hyperlinks clicked on and those passed over. We extend this approach by measuring user mouse and scrolling activity in addition to user browsing activity. We present empirical results that demonstrate our agent can accurately predict some easily measured aspects of one's use of his or her browser.”
“This article is about applications that can be customized or extended through their own user interface. This is achieved by the interface's ability to interpret users' non-literal expressions, namely metaphorical and metonymic ones. Such increased interpretive intelligence depends on static and dynamic models of the domain and application, from which new figurative meanings are abducted automatically or semi-automatically. The system performs controlled modifications on the underlying models, based on its inferences about users' intentions as they produce figurative utterances.”
“The ability to deliver appropriate information to learners at the most appropriate time is an essential component of good instruction. In the best learning environments, this information is received in the context of the performance of the skills that are being acquired. This paper explores a technological approach to situated information retrieval by linking materials to segments of a video recording a skill performance. An interface is described where users navigate through a video performance and are presented with information relevant to the current video location. An approach to algorithmically generating interfaces of this type is then presented. The system takes as input annotations that describe a video recording of a performance, translates these annotations into subject terms used to catalog information resources, and then retrieves materials from online database servers using the 239.50 information retrieval protocol. As an example application, the system was used to generate online teacher professional development materials by linking annotated video of classroom teaching with resources cataloged in the ERIC database.”
“Information processed by computers is frequently stored and organized for the computer's, rather than for the user's, convenience. For example, information stored in a database is normalized and indexed so computers can efficiently access, process, and retrieve it. However, it is not natural for people to manipulate such formal/prescriptive representations. Instead, people frequently sort items by rough notions of association or categorization. One natural organizational process has been found to center around manipulations of objects in spatial arrangements. Examples of this range from the organization of documents and other items on a regular office desktop to the use of 3"x5" cards to organize a conference program. Using visual cues and spatial proximity, people change the categorizations of and relationships between objects. Without the help of indices or perfect memory people can still interpret, locate, and manipulate the information represented by the items and the higher-level visual structures they form. The VITE system presented here is an intuitive interface for people to manipulate information in their own way and at their own pace. VITE provides for configurable visualizations of structured data sets so users can design their own "perspectives" and a direct manipulation interface allowing editing of and manipulation on the structured data.”
“How can an adaptive intelligent interface decide what particular action to perform in a given situation, as a function of perceived properties of the user and the situation? Ideally, such decisions should be made on the basis of an empirically derived causal model. In this paper we show how such a model can be constructed given an appropriately limited system and domain: On the basis of data from a controlled experiment, an influence diagram for making adaptation decisions is learned automatically. We then discuss why this method will often be infeasible in practice, and how parts of the method can nonetheless be used to create a more solid basis for adaptation decisions.”
“We address the problem of realizing communicative plans in graphics. Our approach calls for mapping communicative goals to conceptual tasks and then using task-based graphic design for selecting graphical techniques. In this paper, we present the mapping rules in several dimensions: data aggregation and selection, task synthesis, and task aggregation. Those rules have been incorporated in AutoBrief, a research system for multimedia explanation.”
“This paper describes a series of experiments with a range of users to evaluate an intelligent interface for acquiring problem-solving knowledge to describe how to accomplish a task. The tool derives the interdependencies between different pieces of knowledge in the system and uses them to guide the user in completing the acquisition task. The paper describes results obtained when the tool was tested with a wide range of users, including end users. The studies show that our acquisition interface saves users an average of 32% of the time it takes to add new knowledge, and highlight some interesting differences across user groups. The paper also describes what are the areas that need to be addressed in future research in order to make these tools usable by end users.”
“Attentive systems pay attention to what users do so that they can attend to what users need. Such systems track user behavior, model user interests, and anticipate user desires and actions. Because the general class of attentive systems is broad -- ranging from human butlers to web sites that profile users -- we have focused specifically on attentive information systems, which observe user actions with information resources, model user information states, and suggest information that might be helpful to users. In particular, we describe an implemented system, Simple User Interest Tracker (Suitor), that tracks computer users through multiple channels -- gaze, web browsing, application focus -- to determine their interests and to satisfy their information needs. By observing behavior and modeling users, Suitor finds and displays potentially relevant information that is both timely and non-disruptive to the users' ongoing activities.”
“This paper describes a report tool in which report formats are designated by "Programming by Example"-like operations. Users specify a sample layout of an example row of relational table data on a sheet, and select an iteration pattern of the sample layout. The tool extracts a set of general formatting rules from the sample layout. The rules consist of absolute positions of non-iterative data, relative positions of iterative data, the iteration pattern, and the increment of the iteration. The tool interprets the rules and generates new reports of the format for different table data.”
“The Intelligent User Interfaces (IUIs) conference has grown to become the premier venue for presenting research on the applications of artificial intelligence to human interface design and operation. There is, however, a serious limitation to the IUI conference as it has existed to date. The vast majority of the work which has been presented and discussed at the previous IUI conferences has concerned what might be called "desktop" applications. That is, things an average person would do sitting at a desktop PC connected to the Web -- applications which involve web browsing, library search, document preparation, etc. Such applications are fascinating and challenging, but they represent only a portion of the full body of work going on under the general heading of intelligent user interfaces. There is a long history of 'off the desktop' IUIs -- far longer, in fact, than that of 'desktop' IUIs -- and much ongoing research in this field which bears interesting similarities and differences to the type of work typically reported at IUI. The purpose of this panel will be to introduce IUI participants to this alternate body of research and to, hopefully, begin the process of expanding the focus of the IUI conference so that it fully reflects the range of research being done in IUIs.”
“This is part of a section on Pain extracted from my forthcoming book, "The Emotion Machine," which addresses a wider range of psychological subjects than did my earlier book, "The Society of Mind" To do this it introduces several "large-scale models of the mind." One of these is a broad-brush way to imagine the brain as supporting a "cloud of resources" which interact in various ways to produce various mental phenomena. Here "resource" means any process, function, or structure that can be used by other resources in the course of a mental activity. (To be sure, that statement is circular. But minds themselves are recursive, too, and that is what makes them so powerful.)”
“This paper is about the elicitation of the requirements for an intelligent interface for a software test development environment that will accommodate the physically challenged (PC). This research explores the use of eye-tracking mechanisms and digital manipulative user interfaces that are especially enhanced for the PC. In addition these devices provide assistance for the knowledge elicitation phase for an Intelligent User Interface to such an environment. It was never a stated objective of PCTA (Physically Challenged Test Assistant) to include any intelligent augmentation of the environment. It was challenge enough to get a paraplegic to operate the software test environment. However, in the process of evaluating the data collected in the evaluation of the user interface it was discovered that empirical data existed to predict some of the impasses that occur in the software development and more uniquely in the software testing process.”
“Digital devices today have little understanding of their real-world context, and as a result they often make stupid mistakes. To improve this situation we are developing a database of world knowledge called ThoughtTreasure at the same time that we develop intelligent applications. In this paper we present one such application, SensiCal, a calendar with a degree of common sense. We discuss the pieces of common sense important in calendar management and present methods for extracting relevant information from calendar items.”
“Electronic mail offers the promise of rapid communication of essential information. However, electronic mail is also used to send unwanted messages. A variety of approaches can learn a profile of a user's interests for filtering mail. Here, we report on a usability study that investigates what types of profiles people would be willing to use to filter mail.”
“NaturalJava is a prototype for an intelligent natural-language-based user interface for creating, modifying, and examining Java programs. The interface exploits three subsystems. The Sundance natural language processing system accepts English sentences as input and uses information extraction techniques to generate case frames representing program construction and editing directives. A knowledge-based case flame interpreter, PRISM, uses a decision tree to infer program modification operations from the case frames. A Java abstract syntax tree manager, TreeFace, provides the interface that PRISM uses to build and navigate the tree representation of an evolving Java program. In this paper, we describe the technical details of each component, explain the capabilities of the user interface, and present examples of NaturalJava in use.”
“Information agents are intended to assist their users in locating relevant information in vast collections of documents like the WWW. In many cases, e.g., when trying to integrate pieces of information from previously unrelated sources, it is not sufficient to merely identify documents containing relevant data. Instead, information agents have to identify the interesting portions of these documents and make them available for further use. This paper deals with the problem of training an information agent to identify and extract interesting pieces of information from online documents.”
“This paper describes an intelligent interface to assist in the expert perceptual task of sound equalization. This is commonly done by a sound engineer in a recording studio, live concert setting, or in setting up audio systems. The system uses inductive learning to acquire expert skill using nearest neighbor pattern recognition. This skill is then used in a sound equalization expert system, which learns to proficiently adjust the timbres (tonal qualities) of brightness, darkness, and smoothness in a context-dependent fashion. The computer is used as a tool to sense, process, and act in helping the user perform a perceptual task. Adjusting timbres of sound is complicated by the fact that there are non-linear relationships between equalization adjustments and perceived sound quality changes. The developed system shows that the nearest-neighbor context-dependent equalization is rated 68% higher than the set linear average equalization and that it is preferred 81% of the time.”
“Both the Human Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval fields have developed techniques to allow a searcher to find the information they seek quickly. However, these techniques are designed to augment one's direct-recall memory, where the searcher is actively trying to find information. Associative memory, in contrast, happens automatically and continuously, triggering memories that relate to the observed world. This paper presents design techniques and heuristics for building "remembrance agents," applications that watch a user's context and proactively suggest information that may be of use. General design issues are discussed and illuminated by a description of Margin Notes, an automatic just-in-time information system for the Web.”
“Thanks to recent scientific advances, it is now possible to design multimodal interfaces allowing the use of speech and gestures on a touchscreen. However, present speech recognizers and natural language interpreters cannot yet process spontaneous speech accurately. These limitations make it necessary to impose constraints on users' speech inputs. Thus, ergonomic studies are needed to provide user interface designers with efficient guidelines for the definition of usable speech constraints. We evolved a method for designing oral and multimodal (speech + 2D gestures) command languages, which could be interpreted reliably by present systems, and easy to learn through human-computer interaction (HCI). The empirical study presented here contributes to assessing the usability of such artificial languages in a realistic software environment. Analyses of the multimodal protocols collected indicate that all subjects were able to assimilate rapidly the given expression constraints, mainly while executing simple interactive tasks; in addition, these constraints, which had no noticeable effect on the subjects' activities, had a limited influence on their use of modalities. These results contribute to the validation of the method we propose for the design of tractable and usable multimodal command languages.”
“The APE (Adaptive Programming Environment) project focuses on applying Machine Learning techniques to embed a software assistant into the Visual Works Smalltalk interactive programming environment. The assistant is able to learn user's habits and to automatically suggest to perform repetitive tasks on his behalf. This paper describes our assistant and focuses more particularly on the learning issue. it explains why state-of-the-art Machine Learning algorithms fail to provide an efficient solution for learning user's habits, and shows, through experiments on real data that a new algorithm we have designed for this learning task, achieves better results than related algorithms.”
“The Conversation Map system is a Usenet newsgroup browser that analyzes the text of an archive of newsgroup messages and outputs a graphical interface that can be used to search and read the messages of the archive. The system incorporates a series of novel text analysis procedures that automatically computes (1) a set of social networks detailing who is responding to and/or citing whom in the newsgroup; (2) a set of "discussion themes" that are frequently used in the newsgroup archive; and, (3) a set of semantic networks that represent the main terms under discussion and some of their relationships to one another. The text analysis procedures are written in the Perl programming language. Their results are recorded as HTML, and the HTML is displayed with a Java applet. With the Java-based graphical interface one can browse a set of Usenet newsgroup articles according to who is "talking" to whom, what they are "talking" about, and the central terms and possible emergent metaphors of the conversation. In this paper it is argued that the Conversation Map system is just one example of a new kind of content-based browser that will combine the analysis powers of computational linguistics with a graphical interface to allow network documents and messages to be viewed in ways not possible with today's, existing, format-based browsers which do not analyze the contents of the documents or messages.”
“In recent years, many systems and approaches for recommending information, products or other objects have been developed. In these systems, often machine learning methods that need training input to acquire a user interest profile are used. Such methods typically need positive and negative evidence of the user's interests. To obtain both kinds of evidence, many systems make users rate relevant objects explicitly. Others merely observe the user's behavior, which fairly obviously yields positive evidence; in order to be able to apply the standard learning methods, these systems mostly use heuristics that attempt to find also negative evidence in observed behavior. In this paper, we present several approaches to learning interest profiles from positive evidence only, as it is contained in observed user behavior. Thus, both the problem of interrupting the user for ratings and the problem of somewhat artificially determining negative evidence are avoided. The learning approaches were developed and tested in the context of the Web-based ELFI information system. It is in real use by more than 1000 people. We give a brief sketch of ELFl and describe the experiments we made based on ELFl usage logs to evaluate the different proposed methods.”
“This paper describes a method for learning user's interests in the Web-based personalized information filtering system called WAIR. The proposed method analyzes user's reactions to the presented documents and learns from them the profiles for the individual users. Reinforcement learning is used to adapt the term weights in the user profile so that user's preferences are best represented. In contrast to conventional relevance feedback methods which require explicit user feedbacks, OUT approach learns user preferences implicitly from direct observations of user behaviors during interaction. Field tests have been made which involved 7 users reading a total of 7,700 HTML documents during 4 weeks. The proposed method showed superior performance in personalized information filtering compared to the existing relevance feedback methods.”
“The rapid growth of the Internet has resulted in enormous amounts of information that has become more difficult to access efficiently. Internet users require tools to help manage this vast quantity of information. The primary goal of this research is to create an efficient and effective tool that is able to summarize large documents quickly. This research presents a linear time algorithm for calculating lexical chains which is a method of capturing the "aboutness" of a document. This method is compared to previous, less efficient methods of lexical chain extraction. We also provide alternative methods for extracting and scoring lexical chains. We show that our method provides similar results to previous research, but is substantially more efficient. This efficiency is necessary in Internet search applications where many large documents may need to be summarized at once, and where the response time to the end user is extremely important.”
“Computer gaming offers a unique test-bed and market for advanced concepts in computer science, such as Human Computer Interaction (HCI), computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW), intelligent agents, graphics, and sensing technology. In addition, computer gaming is especially well-suited for explorations in the relatively young fields of wearable computing and augmented reality (AR). This paper presents a developing multi-player augmented reality game, patterned as a cross between a martial arts fighting game and an agent controller, as implemented using the Wearable Augmented Reality for Personal, Intelligent, and Networked Gaming (WARPING) system. Through interactions based on gesture, voice, and head movement input and audio and graphical output, the WARPING system demonstrates how computer vision techniques can be exploited for advanced, intelligent interfaces.”
“Recent research in the area of information retrieval hypothesizes that people benefit from social clues, so called social navigation, when they try to navigate information spaces [7]. We have designed an on-line grocery store building upon those ideas manifested in several different ways. The most central feature is that the system uses a combination of content-based and collaborative filtering as the basis for recipe recommendations. This filtering process can in turn be controlled by editors, whose role is to control the content of the "recipe clubs". Other types of social clues are also present, such as displaying how many users that have chosen a recipe. Finally, the system shows information about other users currently present in the system, and allows users to get in direct contact through chat.”
“In this paper, we describe an outline of "Procedure based help desk system". Preparing enough amounts of contents for help desk system is important for constructing an efficient help desk system. However, the preparation of contents is a hard job for contents-creators (usually, who is an expert of the work.). To support making help desk contents, we developed "Procedure based help desk system". Primary functions of this system are to easily generate help desk contents about software usage (They will be called as "procedure data".). Then the system classifies procedure data and constructs procedure database. Also the system provides useful functions to refer accumulated procedure data.”
“We propose a collaborative exploration system that helps users to explore recommendations from various viewpoints. Given ratings and reviews on movies from reviewers, the system provides "virtual reviewers" that represent particular viewpoints. Each virtual reviewer navigates the user by recommending and characterizing both movies and reviewers according to its viewpoint. We have developed a browsing method with virtual reviewers and visual interfaces.”
“This paper describes the design and implementation of the Office Assistant -- an agent that interacts with visitors at the office door and manages the office owner's schedule. We claim that rich context information about users is key to making a flexible and believable interaction. We also argue that natural face-to-face conversation is an appropriate metaphor for human-computer interaction.”
“We describe the capabilities of a knowledge-based system to automatically generate a collection of electronic notebooks containing various forms of online documentation and reports. This system is a subsystem of a larger knowledge-based system called SciNapse. SciNapse's raison d'etre is to transform high-level simulation problem specifications into executable numerical programs. The electronic notebooks are generated from the same domain knowledge bases that the system uses to perform its primary tasks. These online notebooks are of two different kinds: reference materials and reports. Reference materials are generated from the latest version of the knowledge base, which includes the classes that drive the system, and a network of objects representing meta-information about the system. The reference materials document the system's capabilities and help users understand what the system can do. Reports are generated from the instances created by a run of the system. They document the transformations the input specification underwent in becoming code, and are intended to help a user understand what the system has done. We have found that our approach to producing documents has both advantages and disadvantages when compared with more traditional approaches to documentation. The advantages are that we can minimize the manual effort that is involved in writing documentation about the system, while at the same time maximizing the accuracy of the documentation that is produced. The main disadvantage has been the lack of truly appropriate authoring tools built to work in our environment. When we began, we expected the task of creating such authoring tools to be much easier than it has turned out to be. Later in this paper, we explore some of the factors that have caused this to be the case.”
“We have explored a novel method to find textual relations in electronic documents using genetic programming and semantic networks. This can be used for enhancing information retrieval and simplifying user interfaces. The automatic extraction of relations from text enables easier updating of electronic dictionaries and may reduce interface area both for search input and hit output on small screens such as cell phones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants).”
“We describe a user interface for wireless information devices, specifically designed to facilitate learning about users' individual interests in daily news stories. User feedback is collected unobtrusively to form the basis for a content-based machine learning algorithm. As a result, the described system can adapt to users' individual interests, reduce the amount of information that needs to be transmitted, and help users access relevant information with minimal effort.”
“We describe Rosetta, a digital library system for scientific literature. Rosetta makes it easy for people to find the information for which they are looking even when using short, imprecise queries. Rosetta indexes research articles based on the way they have been described when cited in other documents. The concise descriptions that occur in citations are similar to the short queries people typically form when searching; therefore, citations make a better basis for indexing than do the words used within a research article itself. Using this indexing technique we are able to provide a user interface that presents users with an automatically generated directory of the information space surrounding a query. Our objective with this interface is to present people with the information for which they have asked as well as the information for which they may have intended to ask.”
“Our central claim is that user interactions with everyday productivity applications (e.g., word processors, Web browsers, etc.) provide rich contextual information that can be leveraged to support just-in-time access to task-relevant information. We discuss the requirements for such systems, and develop a general architecture for systems of this type. As evidence for our claim, we present Watson, a system which gathers contextual information in the form of the text of the document the user is manipulating in order to proactively retrieve documents from distributed information repositories. We close by describing the results of several experiments with Watson, which show it consistently provides useful information to its users.”
“Prior research into embodied interface agents has found that users like them and find them engaging. In this paper, we argue that embodiment can serve an even stronger function if system designers use actual human conversational protocols in the design of the interface. Communicative behaviors such as salutations and farewells, conversational turn-taking with interruptions, and referring to objects using pointing gestures are examples of protocols that all native speakers of a language already know how to perform and that can thus be leveraged in an intelligent interface. We discuss how these protocols are integrated into Rea, an embodied, multi-modal conversational interface agent who acts as a real-estate salesperson, and we show why embodiment is required for their successful implementation.”
“The ability to quickly explore and compare multiple scenarios is an important component of exploratory data analysis. Yet today's interfaces cannot represent alternative exploration paths as a branching history, forcing the user to recognize conceptual branch points in a linear history. Further, the interface can only show information from one state at a time, forcing the user to use her memory to compare scenarios. Our system includes a tree-structured visualization for navigating across time and scenarios. The visualization also allows browsing the history and selectively undoing/redoing events within a scenario or across scenarios. It uses the AI formalism of contexts to maintain multiple, possibly mutually inconsistent, knowledge base states. Cross-context formulas can be written for explicit scenario comparison, including visualizations of scenario differences.”
“Computers can be very helpful to us by performing tasks on our behalf. For example, they are very good at performing calculations, storing information and producing visualisations of objects that do not yet exist as a made artifact. Increasingly, however, a different role is being found for the computer. It is the role of a catalyst, or a stimulant, to our own creative thinking. In such cases the computer is not primarily performing a task for us and generating an answer within itself, rather it is helping us to generate answers within ourselves. The computer helps us think creatively. This role for the computer can be illustrated in the context of computer support to creative design. In order to design computer systems that support the creative process, it is important to understand that process well enough to predict what might help, rather than hinder. Given such research, we may begin to define the characteristics of what the computer must do in order to augment creative thinking. The paper explores a particular application of intelligent user interfaces: the augmentation of creative thought in artists.”
“Design problems involve issues of stylistic preference and flexible standards of success; human designers often proceed by intuition and are unaware of following any strict rule-based procedures. These features make design tasks especially difficult to automate. Adaptation is proposed as a means to overcome these challenges. We describe a system that applies an adaptive algorithm to automated user interface design within the framework of the MOBI-D (Model-Based Interface Designer) interface development environment. Preliminary experiments indicate that adaptation improves the performance of the automated user interface design system.”
“Users of complex applications need advice, assistance, and feedback while they work. We are experimenting with "adjunct" user agents that are aware of the history of interaction surrounding the accomplishment of a task. This paper describes an architectural framework for constructing these agents. Using this framework, we have implemented a critiquing system that can give task-oriented critiques to trainees while they use operating system tools and software applications. Our approach is generic, widely applicable, and works directly with off-the-shelf software packages.”
“In this paper we discuss our use of multi-modal input to improve human computer interaction. Specifically we look at the methods used in the Intelligent Classroom to combine multiple input modes, and examine in particular the visual input modes. The Classroom provides context that improves the functioning of the visual input modes. It also determines which visual input modes are needed when. We examine a number of visual input modes to see how they fit into the general scheme, and look at how the Classroom controls their operation.”
“Over the last years there has been a growing consensus that new generation interfaces turn their focus on the human element by enriching an Affective dimension. Affective generation of autonomous agent behaviour aspires to give computer interfaces emotional states that relate and take into account user as well as system environment considerations. Internally, through computational models of artificial hearts (emotion and personality), and externally through believable multi-modal expression augmented with quasi-human characteristics. Computational models of affect are addressing problems of how agents arrive at a given affective state. Much of this work is targeting the entertainment environment and generally does not address the requirements of multi-agent systems, where behaviour is dynamically changing based on agent goals as well as the shared data and knowledge. This paper discusses one of the requirements for real-time realisation of Personal Service Assistant interface characters. We describe an approach to enabling the computational perception required for the automated generation of affective behaviour in multi-agent real-time environments. This uses a current agent communication language so as they not only convey the semantic content of knowledge exchange but also they can communicate affective attitudes about the shared knowledge.”
“Medical information delivery for users with different levels of expertise will be required for the manned mission to Mars due to limited potential for communication with Earth. The Mars Medical Assistant (MMA) uses a combination of user, situation, and task models to create virtual hypertext structures by piecing together medical "information components." Information components are chosen based on the semantic content and the cognitive characteristics of the component's media type. The medical assistant currently supports three tasks: 1) describing medical procedures, 2) aiding diagnosis, and 3) providing information on health concerns. Conflicting suggestions from the three models need to be resolved. Tradeoffs in the model representations and conflict resolution strategies are being explored in the context of MMA.”
“In designing Jabberwocky -- a speech-based interface to Microsoft PowerPoint -- we have tried to go beyond simple commands like "Next slide, please" and make a tool that aids speakers as they present and even learns as they rehearse their presentations. Jabberwocky looks at the contents of the slides, extracting key words and phrases and associating them with their places in the presentation. By listening for these phrases (and synonymous phrases derived using syntactic rules) Jabberwocky is able to follow along with the presentation, switching slides at the appropriate moments. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of this system -- a component of our Intelligent Classroom project -- and look at how we are using it.”
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Mar 22nd, 2010
