Combining AI and Graphics for the Interface of the Future

August 24, 1998

A workshop held in conjunction with the 
the 13th biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence ECAI'98 
August 24, 1998, Brighton, UK.

kindly  
supported 
by: 

        

Workshop Information

What the workshop is about

Both graphics and intelligent behaviour are core ingredients of future user interfaces. Within the AI community there is the vision of so-called intelligent interfaces with advanced communication skills. Interfaces, that are flexible and expressive enough, can accommodate a broad variety of different users with varying needs and preferences. Advances and breakthroughs in the area of computer graphics have made visual media a major ingredient of the modern interface, and it is likely that graphics will play an increasingly dominant role in the way people communicate and interact with computers in the future. Thus, visual communication is becoming increasingly important when building intelligent user interfaces. On the other hand, powerful graphical user interfaces cannot be implemented without considering knowledge of the domain, user, task and the peculiarities of human communication. Techniques for knowledge representation and reasoning, user and discourse modeling, and a variety of generation and interpretation methods are important contributions that can play a major role in building powerful graphical user interfaces.

The target audience for this workshop includes researchers and practitioners working on intelligent graphical user interfaces. The workshop aims at providing an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of new ideas and the discussion of future research directions. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to the following:

Basic issues:

Computational approaches for:

Applications and prototypes:

Final Program

Submissions to the call for papers included extended abstracts, short papers and full papers. All submissions have been reviewed by at least four referees. The selected papers for this 1-day workshop give a good impression of the broad spectrum of research and applications. To foster focused discussions, the presentations have been grouped into two main categories: formal and practical methods for inter-media coordination, and intelligent graphical interaction.

The workshop schedule will provide time for specific discussions directly after each presentation as well as for extended more general exchange of ideas between presentations and sessions. Some of the attendees will be asked to serve as session commentators who summarise and critically reflect on the presentations of a session. Rather than pure descriptions of WHAT has been done, we are especially interested in learning about the strengths and limitations of an approach, current technological barriers, and intended future research directions. In addition, the final session will be devoted to the most interesting questions that occured during the workshop.

Equipment: An OHP and a VHS video player that handles PAL is available.

9:00-9:15 Welcome by the Organizers

9:15-10:45

Session 1: formal methods for inter-media coordination

1.1 Representations for Multimedia Coreference
1.2 Locating Knowledge for Inter-Media Synchronization within Intelligent Multimedia Presentation Systems
1.3 Disambiguation between Visual Display and Represented Domain in Multimodal Interfaces

coffee break (30 minutes)

11:15-13:15

Session 2: practical inter-media coordination

2.1 Computer Graphics and linguistic Felicity
2.2 Describing Abstraction in Rendered Images through Figure Captions
2.3 Speech and Gesture Interaction for Graphical Representations: Theoretical and Software Aspects
2.4 Entering a Shared Information Space Through Heterogeneous Communication Devices
lunch (1 hour)

14:15-15:45

Session 3a: Intelligent graphical interaction and presentation

3.1 Enhancing 3D User Interfaces with Animation Principles Encapsulated in Agents
3.2 Dynamic Visual Emphasis in Interactive Technical Documentation
3.3 Presenting Graphical Objects with a Life-Like Character
coffee break (15 minutes)
16:00-17:00

Session 3b: Intelligent graphical interaction and presentation

3.4 Graphical Abstraction and 3D-Hypergraphics: Exploring large 3D-Models
3.5 Generative, Adaptive Human-Computer Interaction by Conceptual Analogy
17:00-18:00
Working groups: The most interesting questions

In this session we will form several working groups of 3 to 4 participants. In the first 30 minutes each group shall elaborate on a question of general interest which has been identified during the precedent sessions. After that, a speaker of each group shall present the result of the group discussion to the others. The outcome of this section is documented in an epilogue to the workshop.
time to rest
20:00 'til the
fat lady sings 		dinner, place yet to be determined

In addition to the camera ready paper for the workshop proceedings, authors must prepare electronic versions of their papers to be made available prior to the workshop. In particular,  authors are  encouraged to submit their workshop papers simultaneously  to the Intelligent User Interfaces Area of the Electronic Transactions on  Artificial Intelligence  (see  ETAI  for details).
 

Registration

Workshop registration entitles you to attend one workshop of the specified length and receive the workshop notes. Please note that spaces on each individual workshop are limited and so it may not be possible to register in all cases. Note also that workshop delegates must also register for the main conference.

To register for the workshop and the conference, you can either use the web-based registration form or print out a copy of the paper registration form and fill it in. We would prefer you to use the web based version: it carries out various checks, calculates the amounts for you and generates an invoice. It also updates the ECAI-98 database automatically so your registration is received by us as soon as you complete the form. (Your registration will qualify for early registration discounts as long as payment is received within two weeks of submitting the web form).

For futher details (fees, registration forms) please look at the official ECAI page
 

Workshop committee

Organizers:

Thomas Rist (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence)
Steven Feiner (Columbia University)
Andreas Butz (Columbia University)
Ivan Herman (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI))
Antonio Krueger (University of Saarbruecken)

Program committee:

Elisabeth André (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence)
William Bares (North Carolina State University)
Andreas Butz (Columbia University)
Giorgio Faconti (CNUCE, Italy)
Steven Feiner (Columbia University)
Ivan Herman (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI))
Mitsuru Ishizuka (University of Tokyo)
Antonio Krueger (University of Saarbruecken)
John Lee (University of Edinburgh)
James Lester (North Carolina State University)
Joe Marks (Mitsubishi Electronic Research Laboratory)
Jean-Claude Martin (CNRS-LIMSI, France)
Patrick Olivier (University of Wales)
Luis Pineda (IEE, Mexiko)
Bernhard Preim (University of Magdeburg)
Thomas Rist (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence)

Important dates

Address for submisssions and further information

Proposals should be submitted via surface mail or electronically (in UNIX compatible postscript, html, or RTF) to Thomas Rist, at following address:

Thomas Rist
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
D-66123 Saarbruecken
Germany
Tel.: (+49 681) 302-5266
Fax: (+49 681) 302-5341
e-mail: rist@dfki.uni-sb.de

After the workshop ...

... we had a nice dinner in one of Brighton's Indian restaurants.

Thanks to Kathy Boerner for providing the picture. Click to get the larger version of it (95k)

Further information on ECAI '98 is available at the ECAI98 Homepage: http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ecai98/index.html
The URL of this Workshop Homepage is: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~butz/ecai98/index.html
This call is also available in ASCII and Postscript.

Andreas Butz