TE 2006 (TE)
FLUIDS Bulletin - 30th 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
Visualization constitutes a central mechanism for communicating the
state of a situation and operations in application areas like command
and control or logistics and planning.
These domains are characterized by their variety and and quantity of
information which needs to be filtered, tailored and presented in
compact forms that can be efficiently created and displayed.
The work by Hoebel et al. [1998] addresses the problem of graphical
visualization of abstract temporal information in a concrete
spatio-temporal framework.
Temporal planning within a command and control system is presented as
a prototype application which integrates a constraint-based temporal
reasoner and a computer graphics toolkit for the visualization of
spatio-temporal constraints.
A basic idea of the approach is to apply the tissue lens concept
to allow viewing of temporal data through a clipped region of a map,
thus providing spatial context of where and when events might occur.
The visualization consist of a continuously updated display - an
animation - of the constraint space in which an event might exist.
Uncertainty concerning a specific operation as part of the generated
plan can lead to multiple display instantiations.
All of these are displayed simultaneously and in a dynamic and
changing environment, i.e. the visualization is able to show the
space of all the possibilities, the entire constraint space
continuously.
All temporal data come from the temporal reasoner and are used to
drive the dynamic visualization.
Boston-based
Artificial Life, Inc.
is a new software company which develops, markets and supports
intelligent software robots that automate and simplify certain
business-related Internet functions.
The so-called ALife-SmartEngine technology is the core
component that gives
Artificial Life
products the expertise to communicate with users in natural languge
text or speech.
The softbots are designed so that users, especially corporations, can
adapt them to their own applications' needs by adding user or company
specific knowledge and by customizing the softbots.
Artificial Life's
product line comprises several intelligent software robots.
ALife-WebGuide is designed to reside on a WWW site and help
users to navigate. Using natural language conversation the softbot
tries to match the interest of the visitor with relevant information
and Web content.
ALife-Knowledge-Manager is being designed to extract
information embedded in a company's intranet documents and enables
easy retrieval of natural language requests.
ALife-Messenger acts as a natural language-based
automated email reply and answering service.
The ALife-Call-Center-Agent can be used by call centers and
help desks as a component that integrates with pre-existing call
center software. Based on natural language processing it provides
an automated first response to incoming voice telephone calls or email
requests, handling basic call center tasks with virtually no aid from
human operators.
ALife-SalesRep with its very advanced avatar based
intelligent user interface is being developed for electronic commerce
retailers to use for direct marketing on the Internet.
ALife-Personal-Tutor is a natural language based tutoring
program being developed to automatically adapt the difficulty and
content of lessons to the skill level of the student which is
dynamically analyzed using the natural language conversations between
softbot and student user.
ALife-Portfolio-Manager monitors an individual's investment
portfolio according to concerns and criteria specified. When certain
triggers are activated, it autonomously contacts the individual by
telephone, pager, email or other means and alerts that trading actions
might be warranted.
IUI-99, the annual
International Conference on Intelligent User
Interfaces,
once again demonstrates the broad variety and excellence of European
research activities in the area of intelligent user interfaces.
In fact, a contribution originating from Europe received a best paper
award.
Current research trends, as reflected in the conference program, are
characterized through a special emphasis on agent-based, multimedia
interaction and a particular focus on reactive and adaptive user
interfaces.
A further interesting topic are so-called programmable or instructable
user interfaces which allow users to customize the underlying
intelligent system.
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.
-
SIGGRAPH'99:
-
26th International Conference on Computer
Graphics and Interactive Techniques,
Los Angeles, CA, USA, August 8-13, 1999.
The annual meeting of the
ACM
Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics
(SIGGRAPH)
is one of the leading events for disseminating new results related to
research, systems, and applications in the area of advanced computer
graphics.
-
ASC'99:
-
IASTED International Conference on Artificial
Intelligence and Soft Computing,
Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, August 9-12, 1999.
The topics to be covered include also natural language processing and
intelligent user interfaces.
-
HCI Int. '99:
-
8th International Conference on
Human-Computer Interaction,
Munich, Germany, August 22-27, 1999.
The conference will also address various aspects related to
intelligent user interfaces.
The human face, which is a very familiar and sensitive object of human
perception, constitutes an important and complex communication
channel.
Within the computer graphics community, the facial animation field has
received growing interest in the past few years.
A good collection of interesting World-Wide Web links related to
facial modeling and animation is provided by the
Perceptual Science Laboratory at the University of
California in Santa Cruz
under the following address:
Another overview of the research done in facial animation including
many pointers to available on-line information can be accessed at the
following WWW location:
This document constitutes the final issue of the
FLUIDS Bulletin.
In order to provide easy access to the information contained within the
FLUIDS Technology Watch Reports and
Bulletins
an additional topical organization of the contents has been
prepared.
This material is available from the
FLUIDS
Web site under the following address:
- L. Hoebel, W. Lorensen, K. Martin.
- Integrating Graphics and Abstract Data to Visualize Temporal Constraints. SIGART Bulletin
, 9(3/4), 18-23, 1998.
- IUI-99.
- Proc. of IUI '99: Int. Conf. on Intelligent User Interfaces
, Los Angeles, CA, 1999.
Gerd Herzog
Last update: Mon Feb 01 16:00:42 MET 1999
Send comments to herzog@acm.org© DFKI GmbH, 1996-1999
Reproduction is authorized, except for commercial purposes, provided the source is acknowledged.
