Concerning the main topics of current research it must be mentioned that the trend to push agent technology is in North America even stronger than in Europe.
The research focus in Japan, as it is reflected in the Real World Computing program, is more on base technologies for multimedia and multimodal parsing and generation in order to provide the necessary components for the advanced human-machine interfaces of the future.
(New Sep. 96) Anthropomorphic interface agents, i.e. life-like animated characters that interact with a user, add expressive power to a system's communicative skills. The potential for such highly personalized interfaces is also recognized in Japan and the paper Kato et al. [1996] shows, that research is now being actively conducted with regard to this so-called persona technique.
(New Oct. 96) The Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI ) has recently approved a new Human Media project that addresses the development of a multimedia information infrastructure which covers also subjective information such as a taste, a feeling on something, and so on. As the Feasibility Study on Human Media Technology shows, intelligent multimedia techniques are considered as essential technologies for the new generation of human-machine interfaces envisaged in this project.
(New Oct. 96) The Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the US National Science Foundation (NSF ) recently announced a new interagency initiative called STIMULATE (Speech, Text, Image, and Multimedia Advanced Technology Effort), which aims to fund basic research in human multimodal communication, including speech, text, and images, NSF [1996].
(New Nov. 96) The shift towards highly personalized interfaces in which communication between user and computer will be mediated by lifelike agents is going to be the next major step in the evolution of user interface technology. Consequently, a rich spectrum of research efforts related to lifelike computer characters exists. Most of these activities are located in the USA, but major Japanese enterprises are involved as well.
(New Jan. 97) Opposing a current trend towards reducing corporate scientific research, Microsoft Corp. plans to increase spending for basic research by 300 per cent in 1997. During the next five years the investment could run as high as 330 million USD and it is planned to rapidly increase the number of scientists working at the Microsoft Research laboratory from about 150 to 450 or 500. The increase will create the world's largest computer science laboratory within the next two years.
One of the primary research themes at Microsoft Research are more sophisticated user interfaces. This research area, which is called Advanced Interactivity and Intelligence, comprises now six out of a dozen separate research groups. It is very likely that these research efforts will greatly benefit from additional resources available for basic research activities and even more significant contributions to the field of intelligent user interfaces - including intelligent multimedia, graphics, and language technology - can be expected.
(New Apr. 97) Intelligent user interfaces constitute an active research field also in Japan as IUI-97 - the major international forum for outstanding research and development on all aspects of intelligent interfaces - shows. Main research activities of Japanese scientist in academia and industry relate to diverse topics like interface agents and the integration of various modalities into human-machine interaction, including in particular natural language processing and the interpretation and generation of gestures (i.e. sign language) and facial expressions.
Despite the fact that Intelligent User Interface research carried out in Europe and Japan receives growing interest also on the international level the field is still mainly dominated by the USA. Accordingly, the majority of IUI-97 contributions originates from American universities and industrial research laboratories. Certainly, the most obvious research trend is given by the current focus on interface agents. A large proportion of research efforts addresses open issues within the general framework of agent-based intelligent interfaces.
(New May 97) The HPCC (Federal High Performance Computing and Communications) Program in the USA serves to conduct long-term research and development in advanced computing, communications, and information technologies. Intelligent user interface technology plays an important role within the program component area dedicated to Human Centered Systems. According to NCO [1997] current research trends in this context are aiming at:
(New July 97) The major directions in artificial intelligence research - from the perspective of leading US experts - are summarized in a recent article by Doyle and Dean [1997]. This report represents the efforts of the Strategic Directions in Computing Research AI Working Group formed as part of the ACM Workshop on Strategic Directions in Computing Research, held in 1996 at the MIT, Cambridge, MA.
According to Doyle and Dean, the ability to interact naturally with the user constitutes one of the core challenges for the next generation of AI systems since one of the major practical aims is to make working with computers as easy and helpful as working with highly skilled and cooperative humans. Intelligent user interfaces that seek to understand and support the aims of the user are regarded as a key technology. Such interfaces give way to the design of intelligent assistants that go beyond mere decision support by attempting to anticipate and satisfy the needs of the user whenever possible and appropriate. To enhance communication using effective multimodal interaction is one of the important issues for further research in this area. The ability to understand and generate combinations of different communication modalities, such as spoken utterances, written texts, and the gestures that accompany them, as well as appropriate visual displays is required to enable users to communicate in familiar and convenient ways.
(New Nov. 97) In 1997, the biennal IJCAI - the main international event of the artificial intelligence research community - was held in Japan. Consequently, IJCAI-97 has attracted a large number of submissions from Japan. Various contributions to the main conference and special workshops illustrate the broad spectrum of Japanese research activities within the general field of intelligent user interfaces and related areas. Salient trends include a specific focus on information retrieval as an important application area and a high interest in multimodal interaction as well as the utilization of animated anthropomorphic interface agents.
(New Feb. 98) Similar to previous events in this annual conference series of the Association for Computing Machinery , the prevailing number of papers for Multimedia-97 came from the USA. Although base technologies for multimedia servers and systems seemed to be the main topic there were also many contributions that are related to research in the area of intelligent user interfaces. A recurring theme with regard to intelligent interfaces was the development of multimedia user interfaces for content-based information retrieval. Other important topics in current research are multimodal interaction for distributed applications, constraint-based presentation layout, and suitable methods for designing interactive multimedia applications.
(New Feb. 98) UIST-97, a conference devoted to user interface technology, presented a broad range of activities from the USA and also from Japan. Regarding the field of intelligent user interfaces the contributions related to 3D interaction techniques and intelligent, constrained-based graphics generation seem to be most interesting. The conference was followed by a special workshop on Perceptual User Interfaces . This event indicates that more intelligent systems which add perceptual capabilities such as speech and vision to the human-computer interface are receiving more and more interest in academia and industry in the USA as well as Japan.
(New March 98) A recent article by Hamilton [1998] presents a detailed description of current developments at Microsoft Research , Microsoft's corporate research laboratory. The central goal for Microsoft Research is to identify and fund technologies and new applications that are relevant to Microsoft's corporate strategy. A specific focus of the research laboratory, which is expected to triple size over the next few years, is on next-generation systems and the metagroup called Advanced Interactivity and Intelligence conducts leadinge-edge research in several areas related to the field of intelligent user interfaces, including speech technology, vision, natural language processing, user interface development, and decision theory. First results from these research activities are already incorporated into products shipping now. Interesting examples of current research are different projects related to natural speech synthesis, user modeling, 3D interfaces, and conversational interfaces in which users interact with embodied agents or synthetic characters.
(New April 98)
One important issue at IUI-98 turned out to be
the future role of speech technology for the development of more
advanced intelligent user interfaces.
An obvious trend in this area is the growing availability of
sophisticated commercial tools for speech recognition and speech
synthesis.
Another hot topic of current research and development activities in
the USA are real-time intelligent user interfaces for decision support
and information visualization.
The
1998 Intelligent User Interfaces Conference
included even a special workshop on this theme.
(New June 98) CHI-98, the leading conference in the field of human-computer interaction reflects the dominant role of research and development activities being carried out in the USA. Novel technologies like intelligent interfaces are becoming more and more important in the market place. A special panel -- whose participants were all originating from the USA -- was dedicated to current progress and success stories regarding real-world applications of intelligent user interfaces. The contributions from the USA in general show a specific trend to practical applications in the area of health care, education, and entertainment. Other important topics include manipulative user interfaces which provide novel input techniques and special user interfaces for elder people.
(New July 98) AVI-98, which constitutes one of the leading conferences specifically devoted to advanced visual user interfaces, attracted many contributions from the USA. Compared with European research activities presented at the Advanced Visual Interfaces Conference current research in this field in the USA seems to focus more on themes like navigation in information spaces and multimedia design. However, similar to the trend in Europe it can be observed that the general field of advanced visual user interfaces is strongly influenced through Artifical Intelligence approaches like knowledge-based graphics generation and intelligent interfaces.
(New Aug. 98) The Computing Research Association (CRA) is an association of more than 180 North American academic departments of computer science and computer engineering, industrial and government laboratories engaging in basic computing research, and affiliated professional societies. Recently, a booklet CRA [1998] has been compiled by the CRA to illustrate the impact of fundamental research in information technology and to highlight important areas for future research. The case studies presented in this document describe the history, impact, and promise of information technology research in five major areas. Artificial Intelligence is one of those research areas which are of particular importance from the point of view of the CRA information technology experts. In this area, advanced user interfaces are regarded as one of the most fruitful subfields for further research and potential commercial exploitation.
(New Sep. 98) The joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Annual Meeting of the ACL (COLING/ACL-98) once again demonstrates the important role of the USA in this research field given the fact that the majority of the (active) participants are working in North America. With less than 15 % conference particpants from Japan the Japanese contingent is relatively small compared with Europe. The various contributions from Japan, however, indicate that the major trends in current research are quite similar to the USA. A common global trend is the high interest in natural language generation and the growing importance of multimodal systems in support of communication forms that extend natural language interaction with additional modalities. Both, Japanese and US researchers presented a broad spectrum of current research activies at the post-conference workshop dedicated to Content Visualization and Intermedia Representations . Theoretical and algorithmic aspects concerning dialog structures are being considered intensively as well. Information retrieval, extraction and classification as an area with a high commercial potential seems to be another specific focus in the USA.
(New Oct. 98) The 15th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in the USA, AAAI-98, attracted also a broad spectrum of contributions from the general field of intelligent (multimedia) user interfaces. In this area, intelligent environments are regarded as an important application field and a second important topic relates to suitable representation formats for intelligent processing of multimodal communication. The latter issue also became the subject of a specialized workshop AAAI [1998b].
(New Dec. 98)
A new large-scale endeavour in the field of intelligent user interfaces
has been initiated by
NASA
in support of the ambitious goals to be achieved over the next 25
years like for example the International Space Station, the largest
space venture ever undertaken. Other important goals include the
accurate prediction of climate and resources over decades, not just
days, the detection of Earth-sized planets 600 trillion miles away
with a telescope powerful enough to determine signs of life, and the
use of the International Space Station as a platform for an astronaut
to visit Mars.
As described in Goldin et al. [1998],
NASA
has begun planning and developing the so-called Intelligent
Synthesis Environment (ISE) which aims to link scientists, design
teams, manufacturers, suppliers, and consultants in the creation and
operation of an aerospace system and in synthesizing its missions.
ISE follows a computing paradigm that is parallel, distributed,
collaborative, and immersive.
Computational intelligence is seen as one of the essential component
technologies of the ISE. In the ISE, human-centric computing is
emphasized and to be achieved through the use of
(New Jan. 99) As reported in Cohen et al. [1998], the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched a project that focuses on technology for developing very large, flexible, and reusable knowledge bases. Evaluation of the constituent technologies centers around two challenge problems in crisis management and battlespace reasoning. Since the project aims at the development of integrated systems - in other words knowledge-based, interactive software systems - this large-scale research activity is highly relevant with regard to the field of intelligent user interfaces.
(New Feb. 99) As the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces IUI-99 shows, the USA still plays a leading role in this specific research area. Within academic and industrial research groups based in North America different subfields of intelligent interface research receive particular attention. This includes information retrieval agents and user interface issues related to collaborative filtering as well as intelligent multimedia interfaces and so-called visual and plan-based user interfaces. In addition, collaborative, spoken-language interface agents are regarded as a specific hot topic in current research and development activities.