TE 2006 (TE)
FLUIDS Bulletin - 9th 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
The exponential growth of the World-Wide Web leads to a giant global
on-line information space.
Finding relevant, high-quality information on the Web, however,
constitutes a difficult problem and WWW users thus require
sophisticated tools to help them cope with the mass of content
available on-line.
Automatic recommender systems - see Resnick and Varian [1997] - which rely on
collaborative information filtering, aim to provide assistance in
making selections.
During the last years, this kind of approach has evolved into an
interesting new application field for advanced user modeling techniques.
The special section in the March 1997 issue of
Communications of the ACM
provides a good overview of recent advances in this area.
The administration of a complex IT environment requires integrated
enterprise-wide data, system, application and network management
solutions in order to ensure availability, reliability, and
performance of business-critical applications.
Sophisticated application management tools offer a global
administrative view of the entire application process and provide
automated monitoring and management support with regard to important
issues like performance optimisation, event management, service level
management, capacity planning and fault management.
Administrator consoles equip the operator with a powerful user
interface for access to and control over the entire systems environment.
Aiming at real-time decision support for system operators the
provision of administrative information constitutes a salient aspect.
Hence, an application management utility needs to serve as a
comprehensive information-gathering tool.
A new approach followed in novel products like
PATROL
from
BMC Software, Inc.
and
Compuware Corporation
's
EcoTOOLS
is the use of agent technology.
Intelligent autonomous agents monitor activity independent of the
management station.
These agents discover the environment, continuously survey related
systems, detect problems, initiate alarms and corrective actions,
and thus can provide intelligent access to relevant information on
demand.
This improves information presentation in the graphical management
console (using multiple media like text, graphics, and animation)
since the competences of the intelligent agents can easily be
exploited for selecting and accessing relevant information.
The trend towards broader deployment of agent technology also affects
research and development efforts in the area of human-computer
interaction.
Various approaches towards building intelligent user interfaces are
concerned with the application of multi-agent architectures.
Aiming at service integration, the utilization of open agent
architectures is regarded as a promising strategy to facilitate the
development of adaptive and extensible interfaces.
Applications currently under investigation in Europe cover a broad
range of activities, like for example multimedia services on public
information kiosks, computer-integrated manufacturing, and information
systems for medical applications.
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:
- intelligent information agents for managing, analyzing, and
presenting massive amounts of distributed multimedia information;
- systems that enable multi-modal human system interactions
including speech, touch, and gesture recognition and synthesis;
- virtual reality environments that provide advanced visualization
techniques.
Major application fields to be adressed include scientific research,
health care, manufacturing, and training.
Among others, collaborative environments facilitating geographically
distributed interactions, remote operator interfaces for monitoring
and controlling machinery and processing systems, and clinical
decision support systems, andconstitute typical examples for potential
applications.
-
ISDSS'97:
-
4th Conference of the International Society
for Decision Support Systems
,
Lausanne, Switzerland, July 21-22 1997.
The conference will present original research papers on the design,
development and implementation, and use of decision support systems.
-
AAAI'97:
-
14th National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence
,
Providence, RI, USA, July 27-31, 1997.
The national summer conference of the
American Association for Artificial Intelligence
constitutes an important forum for the scientific interchange among
Artificial Intelligence researchers and practitioners from all over
the world.
-
SIGGRAPH'97:
-
24th International Conference on Computer
Graphics and Interactive Techniques
,
Los Angeles, CA, USA, August 3-8, 1997.
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.
-
IDA'97:
-
Second International Symposium on Intelligent
Data Analysis
,
London, UK, August 4-6, 1997.
Although the main focus is on ``Reasoning About Data'' aspects
related to information presentation-especially for decision support
applications-will certainly be considered as well.
-
IJCAI'97:
-
15th International Joint Conference on
Artificial Intelligence
,
Nagoya, Japan, August 23-29, 1997.
The biennal IJCAI is the main international gathering of researchers
in AI.
The supplementary workshop program includes this time the following
interesting events:
Hal Varian has put together a comprehensive list of links to
recommender systems and other WWW resources related to collaborative
filtering.
This list of on-line resources is available from:
In the context of the
University of Maryland information filtering project
a more general collection of information filtering resources is being
maintained on-line at:
- NCO.
- High Performance Computing and Communications: Advancing the Frontiers of Information Technology - A Report by the Committee on Computing, Information, and Communications of the National Science and Technology Council
. Blue Book FY 1997, US National Coordination Office for Computing, Information, and Communications, Arlington, VA, 1997.
- P. Resnick, H. R. Varian.
- Recommender Systems
. Communications of the ACM , 40(3), 56-58, 1997.
Gerd Herzog
Last update: Sun Aug 3 01:25:24 MET DST 1997
Send comments to herzog@acm.org© DFKI GmbH, 1996-1997
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