TE 2006 (TE)
FLUIDS Bulletin - 19th Issue
FLUIDS Project Partners:
MIZAR Automazione S.p.A. (Co-ordinator)
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
DFKI German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence GmbH
Consorzio 5T
Flexible access to large amounts of multimedia information offers
a very interesting application area for intelligent user interface
technology.
The emerging field called intelligent multimedia information retrieval
lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, information
retrieval, human-computer interaction, and multimedia computing.
Research and development in this area aims at powerful systems which
enable users to create, process, summarize, present, interact with,
and organize information within and across different media such as
text, speech, graphics, imagery, and video. These novel systems go
beyond traditional hypermedia and hypertext environments to analyze
and generate media, and support intelligent interaction with or via
multiple media.
The contributions in Maybury [1997] document recent advances
regarding intelligent multimedia information retrieval and provide a
good overview off current research activities in this new field.
Another player in the advanced data visualization marketplace is
Belmont Research Inc.
,
a company based in Cambridge, MA, USA.
The two primary data visualization products offered by
Belmont Research
are
CrossGraphs
,
a multidimensional data visualization and graphical reporting tool,
and
CG++,
an advanced graphical programming development environment.
With
CrossGraphs
a user can simultaneously explore huge amounts of complex data by
displaying statistical graphics partitioned across selected
dimensions.
The system output consists of a series of graphs as a combined
presentation which can be exploited to better understand data
relationships and to spot trends and patterns that either would not be
found by looking at single, simple charts or would require an
excessive effort using traditional graphing tools.
The product
CG++
is a cross-platform object-oriented programming language and
integrated development environment for building graphical software.
This data visualization programming language is appropriate for cases
which require specialized visualization graphics.
The powerful tool set can be used to create customized graphic
visualizations for decision-support systems which let users visualize
and interact with complex information intuitively and consistently.
CG++
is sold as a standalone rapid application development environment, and
it is also included in the
CrossGraphs
customization option as the
CrossGraphs
extension language.
In the face of omnipresent computer applications and the anticipated
widespread use of emerging telematic services theres is a growing need
for the design of high quality user interfaces accessible and usable
by a diverse user population with different abilities, requirements
and preferences.
The vision of constructing user interfaces for all - including
people with different cultural, educational, training and employment
background, novice and experienced computer users, the very young and
the elderly and people with different types of disabilities -
constitutes an important goal of European research and development
activities in the area of human-computer interaction.
Intelligent user interface techniques play a significant role for the
design of human-machine interfaces, which not only support more
efficient and effective user interaction, but also address the
individual end user needs, requirements, skills and expectations,
while exhibiting a wide range of intelligent and cooperative behaviour.
The European trend to advanced artficial intelligence methods in
support of adaptable and adaptive interaction, user modeling,
multimedia/multimodal interfaces, virtual and augmented reality,
etc., is well reflected by the contributions to the
ERCIM
(European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics)
workshop on ``User Interfaces for All'' (see Stephanidis and Carbonell [1997]).
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.
-
KRIMS'98:
-
Second International Workshop on Knowledge
Representation for Interactive
Multimedia Systems
,
Trento, Italy, June 1, 1998.
The workshop series is specifically concerned with the problem of
knowledge representation for intelligent multimedia user interfaces.
-
IEA-AIE'98:
-
Eleventh International Conference on Industrial
and Engineering Applications of Artificial
Intelligence and Expert Systems
,
Benicàssim, Spain, June 1-4, 1998.
The conference emphasizes applications of artificial intelligence and
expert/knowledge-based systems (including intelligent interfaces) to
engineering and industrial problems.
-
AI'98:
-
Twelfth Canadian Conference on Artificial
Intelligence
,
Vancouver, Canada, June 18-20, 1998.
The conference covers all subareas of artificial intelligence research.
-
ED-MEDIA'98:
-
AACE World Conference on Educational
Multimedia and Hypermedia
,
Freiburg, Germany, June 20-25, 1998.
The conference also invites relevant contributions from the field of
artificial intelligence.
The World Wide Web home page of the working group on
``User Interfaces for Al''
of
ERCIM
,
the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics,
is located at:
The site contains in particular the electronic proceedings of the
annual workshops organized by the working group.
Online information concerning the
Computer Graphics Network
of the
European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics
(ERCIM
)
is available directly from the
ERCIM
Web site:
- S. Hamilton.
- Inside Microsoft Research. Computer, 31(1), 51-58, 1998.
- M. T. Maybury, ed.
- Intelligent Multimedia Information Retrieval. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997.
- C. Stephanidis, N. Carbonell, eds.
- 3rd ERCIM Workshop on User Interfaces for All
, Obernai, France, 1997.
Gerd Herzog
Last update: Tue Mar 31 15:10:39 MET DST 1998
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